


A Mountain, Full of Cages

by Pugnash



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - No Smaug, Dubious Consent, Emotional Abuse, Epilepsy, Everybody is fucked up, F/M, Infant Death, M/M, Minor Character Deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-12
Updated: 2013-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-26 09:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/964285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pugnash/pseuds/Pugnash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“We can't let Kíli die,” Fíli said hoarsely. “We mustn’t. I need him.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“I know,” Ori said.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“You don’t. He’s unique. He’s the only person in the world who can love unconditionally, purely.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>There was a long silence and then Ori said, a little sadly, “You don’t really think that’s true, do you, Fíli?”</i>
</p><p>In a world where Smaug was slain during his first assault and Erebor rebuilt from his ashes, the royal line of Thror endures in  the cruel king Thrain, the silent Thorin who rules from behind the throne, the mad Frerin who murders his wives, and their grandmother who treats children as dolls. After Dis is executed for attempting to overthrow her father, Fíli and Kíli are left to be raised in a family that trusts no one, least of all their own blood.</p><p>But the brothers have each other, and that will make all the difference. Won't it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Infancy

**Author's Note:**

> I ended up challenged to write a dark!AU with Durincest, and this is the result. But I couldn't resist Ori/Kíli on the side because I'm a sucker.

1\. 

Kili’s first memory was of an argument between his mother and Uncle Thorin. He didn’t remember the words, only that he was in Mama’s arms and it did not feel safe and he wanted her to put him down. Mama kept turning away, but Thorin would step around her so she was facing him over and over. It wasn’t like the rows that he watched Dori and Nori have, years later, with smashed crockery and insults fired liked arrows and shouts so loud they shook the windows. Instead, his mother’s low voice was jagged and cutting right down to the nerve like the shudder of a wrench scraped across smooth steel. 

 

2.

Dwalin was his favourite. Dwalin was the captain of the royal guard. He always smiled (later, Kili would wonder if it was just that he always smiled when Kili was looking at him). He let Kili tug his beard and run stubby fingers over Dwalin’s finely-carved axes and stand both of his small feet on Dwalin’s boot, hugging Dwalin’s leg while Dwalin lounged outside the throne room. Kili felt safe there, a small bird alighting on the flank of some great beast where it knew no predator could strike.

 

3.

He remembered an argument between Thorin and his mother – years after the first one, and there were many in between – in which Thorin had shouted, “It’s unworthy of our line, it’s foul of a widow to show such indiscretion, let alone with a common soldier!” and Mama had slapped him so hard that Kili, playing in the corner, had flinched. 

“Our line is worthy of nothing, brother, and it sickens me that you refuse to see that,” she had spat at him. “We should be nothing but dragon-ash and heads on pikes. Mahal, see it done.”

 

4\. 

When he was very small, he and Fili were woken by the clash of steel and the shouts of dying men. Their nurse came in, wearing only her petticoats and a busty nightshirt, and made them get up and put their coats on over their nightgowns. She took their hands and led them to the little door behind the bookshelf and told them to stay there until they heard her or their mother calling for them.

They stayed in the darkness and fell asleep. When they awoke it was to silence and more darkness, ending and heavy. Kili had wet himself and the dampness was cold and clinging in his nightgown. He cried for mama and Fili got angry at him, and that made him cry harder. 

For hours and hours they waited, sleeping on and off. 

It was a young stranger named Gloin who opened the door and called them out. The light filled the world and hurt their eyes. Kili’s underwear was sore against his skin because the dampness had been rubbing at his legs. Hungry and confused, they went with Gloin and his retinue of guards. The air stunk of smoke and there was blood on the shield of one guard. They were taken to a storeroom and left there, and then moved to Uncle Thorin’s study. The chairs had been overturned and the curtain pulled down. Fili complained that he was starving and someone brought them cold, boiled potatoes and carrots, which they ate so fast it smeared across their faces and hands. 

They were brought at last to their great grandmother, who scolded their guards and cleaned them in freezing water straight from the well and sent for fresh clothes.

“What’s happening, Amma?” Fili asked. Her birth name was Gullhring, but everybody called her Amma, _‘grandmother’_ , even her maids. “Where is everyone?”

“Your mother has done something very foolish,” Amma said, scrubbing Kili’s face as he whined and struggled. “She was always a foolish girl, oh yes. I said so from the beginning.”

Mama’s coup had failed.

 

5.

They executed Mama and Dwalin three days later. Fili and Kili were brought to watch from a dais constructed above the crowd. Mama and Dwalin knelt before the blocks. Kili remembers that her eyes were dry and that she looked towards him and her mouth moved, saying something he couldn’t hear above the roar of the crowd. The cheers were for traitors’ blood. Mama’s mouth made words and afterwards he always wondered if she was saying, “I love you” or “Goodbye” or if it was a prayer to Mahal. And sometimes he wondered if she was really looking at him at all.

(And later, so much later, Thorin told him he had never been looking at Kili but at Thorin himself, and had said, “I will see you again, brother.”)

They did Dwalin first. Later, Kili didn’t remember what it looked like. But Kili remembered that soon the axe came down and Mama’s head came off and there was a lot of blood. It was bright like silk, brighter than the blood that had been on the guards’ shield. 

Kili began to cry. His brother put a hand over his mouth and whispered, “Don’t, don’t please, Grandpa will punish you.” Kili couldn’t stop, but Thrain was easily distracted even then and did not see him.

 

6.

They had many nurses and nannies and governesses after that, but Amma ruled the nursery. She loved the boys and doted and praised, giving them anything they wanted and tempering their grizzles with her enfolding arms and the powdery scent of her skin. When they misbehaved she sat them down and spoke to them at length about the proper conduct of princes, and she seemed the wisest creature in the world. From the earliest Kili could remember, her beard was long and white as fresh-fallen snow, braided elaborately every morning. She looked like how Kili imagined the maiar of Mahal would appear in dwarven form.

But she was impatient often. If the tantrums didn’t abate within a few moments she would leave them to the nannies. She grew angry if she wanted to see the boys and they were asleep or having a bath or just took too long to come to her side, yet if she was busy and they wanted to visit her or show her something she would scold their guardians for not keeping them out of her rooms. Kili scolded the nannies too, if he did not get his way, promising them, “I’ll tell Amma! Give it to me, or I’ll tell her!” and they never disobeyed him.

Once a week, Kili was expected to appear for dinner with his uncles and Amma. He hated these long, boring meals and did not want to wear the tight, itchy suit in which he was supposed to be presented. On one particular day they were already late and Kili wouldn’t stop struggling and screaming. When his dressing-nurse tried to button up his shirt, he sunk his teeth into her wrist hard enough to leave imprints. She grabbed him and put him over her knee and hit him twice on the backside with her right hand. 

Amma walked in just in time to see it. Kili’s screams turned to sobs as the nurse set him quickly on his feet and stood up. She asked Amma to forgive her, she was teaching him not to bite. Amma had the nurse’s right hand cut off and she was dismissed.

Nor did Amma like the governesses being too friendly. She did not like to see them comforting her great-grandsons, or singing to them, or rocking them in the huge wetnurse’s chair that still stood in their bedroom. Amma would slap any dam who stole too much of her boys’ affections. They soon learned. And so Kili was raised mostly by clockwork nannies and governesses, reeking always of fear. They were stiff-voiced and cold in stance and touch. Instead, it was Amma who held him and told him stories in bed and wiped away his tears when he fell over. But never on demand. He got everything he wanted when he wanted it, all except for that, and that not from anyone.

 

7.

Fili was Kili’s first and only friend, at least for the first twenty-one years of his life.

It began some time after Kili had reached his tenth birthday. Before then he had regarded his brother as a villain and a distraction, who knew best how to please Amma and get her attention, who wouldn’t share his toys. They had always had separate nannies, separate rooms, separate lessons, and neither of them had ever complained about this. They fought more than they played together. 

But then something changed in Fili. He became patient and quiet. He was no longer interested in the same toys as Kili. He insisted on dressing himself, and his brother too when the nurses would let him. When Amma was busy with other important things – the design of Thorin’s new standard, the food for Thrain’s next feast, the friends she did not approve of Frerin making – Fili would sit up in Kili’s bed and tell him stories about the desolation of Smaug and the creation of the first father until he fell asleep. Sometimes he would smuggle Kili away from the nannies and take him to see Papa’s marker on the Wall of Rememberance. He sat cross-legged with Kili in his lap and told him about how Papa was a hero who had died in the goblin wars before Kili was born. Other times he taught Kili the secret passages of the palace and showed him the best views of the city, even sneaking him outside to see the sky and the mountain peak and the green growing things that clothed their home. Fili was holding his hand walking across the mountain paths when Kili saw and felt rain for the first time. It was like magic – not necessarily a good magic, for it was cold and uncomfortable after the first few minutes of delight – but a strange and wild magic. Kili had never known about weather, nor forests, nor the towering peaks of outer Erebor and the distant Misty Mountains; all things in the world in which his grandfather did not rule absolutely.

Kili began to run to his brother’s room in the morning and burrow under the blankets to curl beside him and put his cold feet on Fili’s legs until he got up. He began to follow Fili to his lessons and threw tantrums when he was shut outside. But even this Fili managed to head off if he could, gripping Kili’s arms and ordering him to calm himself or waiting the tantrum out if it was already too fierce to contain.

Slowly, Kili grew out of the tantrums. He shot up tall and was noticed by Thorin for the first time, like something sprouting out of a crack in a familiar path that had suddenly flowered. Fili carefully coached Kili on how to behave around Uncle Thorin, how to speak and when to stay silent and when to know he was dismissed. Afterwards, they would sit in the bay windows that looked over the underground city and giggle about how severe and grim Thorin was, doing impressions to each other until Kili’s sides hurt from laughing.

Frerin must have noticed Kili too, as he began to speak to Kili during family dinners or the concerts that Amma occasionally dragged them to. He always seemed very kind and interested. “How are your lessons, nephew?” and “Are you enjoying the music, nephew?” But Fili told Kili not to speak to him. Without an answer, Frerin would soon end their conversations with something like, “You must pay attention; we all worry you’ll end up as brick-headed as your father.” Kili always felt small and stupid after talking to Frerin, but Fili told him not to listen.

Fili always knew what to do. Kili wondered who had taught him. It was years later that he realised Fili had learned alone, by trial and error.

 

8\. 

Thorin decided it would be best if his nephews took their lessons with other children. He said that Fili already had the makings of a good leader, but he must be equal with others in order to grow well. By the time Kili was in his teens they were sent to a school for the sons of the wealthiest nobles in Erebor. At first they were given fake names to use, but very soon everyone found out who they were and there was no point anymore. 

Fili always seemed to have other boys gathered around him like a ram with his flock, but Kili found it hard to talk to strangers. He had never had other children in his life before, except for servants, and he knew only how to order people about, which just made the boys at school laugh at him and mock him. Before long he sat alone at the back of the class day-in and day-out, watching Fili sit in a circle of friends who desperately fawned and copied the crown prince and turned coldly away from the younger.

He didn’t mind being on his own, but the work was difficult. He could make his letters and notch out his sums easy with his left hand, but the scholars who taught them would not let him do this. They were not supposed to hit him, prince as he was, but they called him names or pinched his ears to make him write with his sword-hand. They said he would develop asymmetries and weaknesses if he used the wrong hand. Kili learned to sit staring at his work with his pencil gripped on the right, watching for the teacher in the corner of his eye, and then swap over very quick and quiet until he saw them coming. 

At last the teachers tied his left hand behind his back every morning, painfully tight, until the blood pooled in his fingers and it felt like needles were stabbing all over his palm. They would not untie him even during the meal breaks. He learned to cut his food with the side of his fork. It was clumsy work. He couldn’t sit straight up in his chair. When he walked through the halls, other boys laughed and pushed him when Fili wasn’t looking. He couldn’t keep his balance, couldn’t always catch himself with his right hand. He hated them all. He wished they would hurt him or hit him properly, leave a bruise or a bloodied mark, so that when he went back to the palace he could tell Amma and she would have them all executed. But they never hurt him seriously and when he tried to tell Fili, his brother told him to be the stronger dwarf and not react to their torments. They were only words, Fili said. They would soon grow bored and leave him be, Fili said. Don’t be so cowardly, Fili said.

Kili tried to be the stronger dwarf. He spoke less and less, hiding behind his fringe, and tried to focus only on his work. But the more he forced his hand to make the letters the more his head hurt.

Soon he began to stutter when he spoke. Fili laughed at first. “Why are you doing that?” he asked.

“I c-c-can’t h-help-p it,” Kili mumbled, clutching his books to his chest as they walked up the long steps to the palace. The teachers had finally stopped tying his arm behind his back, and his letters with his right hand were not even ranked the worst in the class. But it still took him longer to write anything.

“You c-c-can’t help it,” Fili mocked. He thought it was a game.

It wasn’t a game. The stutter got worse. Amma began to worry that Kili was feeble-minded, especially with his poor writing and fidgety nature, as reported by the teachers. Worse still, Frerin soon learned about the stutter and took every opportunity to corner Kili and ask him about his day, interrupting him to echo him clearly every few words.

“…I h-have to g-g-go, Frer-r-rin…”

“You what? Oh, you have to _go_ ,” Frerin smirked, stepping neatly in front of him. “But where are you going?”

“T-t-to f-find Fili.”

“What? What’s that? To find Fili. Say it with me now, Kili, it’s not hard.”

Kili boiled with rage. He wanted to hit Frerin, but he didn’t dare. His uncle was still a foot taller then him and twice his weight, his arms honed by his warrior’s training. Frerin was going to be the commander of the army one day, when Thorin became king. Then he would have thousands of dwarves behind him, thousands of armed soldiers to help corner Kili in the halls and ask him how his day went, where he was going. They would be like the boys at school, who fawned and sighed around his brother but as soon as Fili was gone, turned dark laughs and cruel m-m-mockeries on Kili.

It was all too much.

 

9.

One day, twenty-one years old and still too skinny to swing an axe, Kili panicked and skipped school. He told Fili he had forgotten his stylus and had to return to the palace. He promised he would only be a few minutes. Fili went on with the royal guards that walked them to the lower halls each day. Kili ran back to the palace, but he wasn’t looking for his stylus. He thought he would go down to the kitchen and sit with the cooks all day, eating scones and listening to them gossip. 

As he was hurrying down the long, winding stairs to the lower floors, he looked along one of the grand hallways and locked eyes with Frerin. His uncle was talking to some minister of the court, but his head jerked around as he saw Kili. For half a moment, Kili thought Frerin must have important business and would ignore him. But then he saw the gleam in his uncle’s eyes and he knew he was caught.

He ran, throwing himself down the stairs three at a time. He heard Frerin’s voice calling, and Frerin’s swift, heavy footsteps along the marbled halls. “Hey! Hey, little N-n-nephew! Why aren’t you at school?”

A lump swelled in Kili’s throat. He felt cowardly and sick, but much more than that he was frightened of being caught, of being sent back with permission to finally have him caned for his insolence, or worse still being dragged in front of Thorin. Uncle Thorin would not lay a hand on him. Uncle Thorin would simply talk at him, in a cold and disappointed voice. It would be worse than dying.

Kili ran. He took side passages and doors without thinking about his direction. He had been raised in the beehive of the palace, set deep into the bedrock of Erebor, but there were only a few paths that he knew well enough to navigate in a panic. Soon he found himself in a silent, high-roofed hallway. The walls were set with the horns and scalps of prized beasts, deer and elk and bison. Kili hurried along it, sucking down air to ease his burning lungs. Tears pricked in his eyes and shame spread through his blood. He felt unworthy as a child of Durin’s line. He wished he was a miner’s son. He wished he was dead.

He heard a pair of maids coming from the other direction and ducked into the first side door he could find. The room beyond was dark as pitch and smelled of dust and stretched leather. As his eyes adjusted he realised he was in a records room. As he crept on towards the light, he found himself on a cloister above the grand library. The huge, branched room was lit by myriad wax lamps hung on scores of chandeliers, high above the precious, flammable books. 

The tears were coming fast and unquenchable now. Kili reached an alcove halfway along the cloister and sat down in it, pulling his knees up to his chin. He sobbed in silence, trying to wipe his eyes over and over again and always finding the flood replenished down his cheeks. Finally the heaving of his chest slowed and the pounding in his head diminished. He rested his brow on his knees, exhausted. His ears were ringing. There was a growing thud out of tune with his heartbeat. 

Kili realised that footsteps were approaching. He raised his head with a jerk. Through his blurred eyes he saw a figure in brown, baggy clothes. It was a boy no older than him, with greyish-red hair like a faded dustcover and no beard. The boy stood hunched a few feet away, his hands hanging entwined at his waist.

“Are you looking for a book?” he asked.

Kili rubbed his arm across his eyes. “D-d-o I l-look lik-k-ke I want a b-book?” he snarled.

The boy pressed his lips together and fumbled with a thread on his sleeve. “I suppose not. But it’s the only reason most people come in.”

“G-go aw-way!” Kili wrapped his arms around his shoulders.

There was the sound of a door slamming shut some distance off. The boy jumped and leaned over the rail of the cloister. From the floor below came Frerin’s loud, familiar voice. “Ho! You, lad, have you seen a young dwarf come through he? Dark hair, sour face, talks awful funny?”

The librarian glanced across at Kili, who had frozen in place with his shoulders hunched and his arms locked around his knees. No, no, no he wanted to disappear, to be anywhere but under Frerin’s eye. He wanted Fili. He wanted to be alone completely and utterly.

But the boy just leaned over and called, “Not through here, sir, it’s quiet as the grave. I’d have heard him for sure.”

Frerin responded with a low grumble and his footsteps receded. The door slammed shut. Kili raised his head to look at the boy standing over him. 

“Don’t I get a ‘thank you’?” the boy asked.

Kili wiped his nose on the back of his. “I d-don’t have to thank s-servants,” he scowled.

The boy laughed. It was a bright, careless sound. He did not sound as if he feared anything. He asked, “Do you want some wine?”

“W-what?” Kili frowned up at him.

“I’m all on my own today. It’s dead boring, and the head librarian never notices bottles missing from his cabinet. I'm Ori, by the way.”

He held out his hand. After a long moment, Kili took it and was pulled to his feet.

And this was how he met his second friend in the world.

 

10.

“W-why do y-y-…” Kili swallowed and drained the last of his cup. “…You work here?” he finished, putting the cup down with a loud clack.

“My brother Dori thinks construction is too dangerous,” Ori said, resting his head on one hand. They sat in the head librarian’s office. It stunk of stale meal-scraps and unwashed dwarf, but it was also accessed only by a small, heavy door hidden in the shadows behind the reading desks in the main room. No one would find him here, Kili knew. Ori shrugged. “He says I’m too dreamy to operate a sledgehammer. And I know how to read. Construction would be a waste, Dori says.”

“N-no, I m-m-m…” Kili closed his eyes and took a breath. The wine was making his joints tingle and his heart race, but it swept his thoughts along too. He wanted to get them out properly. “No, I mean, why do you h-have to work at all. W-why aren’t you at s-school?”

A wrinkle appeared in Ori’s brow and he giggled. He had a whole range of odd little chuckles and sniggers, like a jeweller’s toolbox. Kili couldn’t help smiling at each new one. Finally Ori said, “My Mam is sick and and my brother Nori is hopeless so it’s only Dori and I can work really. School’s for rich folks. Dori taught me my letters and fixed me up the job here. I’m paid a _mahb_ a week that goes to home and I can read whatever I like if I’m careful with the pages. That’s better than school.”

“W-why doesn’t your f-father look after your m-m-m—” he couldn’t get it out, but Ori picked up the thread without blinking.

“We never see my dad. Or Nori’s dad. Or Dori’s dad,” he gave a new laugh at Kili’s face, a chesty guffaw that echoed around the small room.

Kili smiled and reached for the bottle. “M-me neith-th-ther.”

They finished the bottle and talked for hours. Kili’s stutter came and went but Ori never seemed to even notice it. When they got hungry they ate flat oatcakes with dripping inside, prepared and wrapped in cheesecloth by Ori’s older brother, and then had another half a bottle. Kili no longer had any clue what the time was or whether anyone would still be looking for him, but at last he decided that he had to face the outside world. 

As he reached the door he turned back to Ori, his heart suddenly racing again. "My name's K-k-kili."

A ruddy blush touched Ori's cheeks. "I know," he said. "I've seen you around."

"Oh. I d-d-didn't r-remember you," Kili said, feeling his own cheeks flood with heat. 

"I expect that happens a lot," Ori said, and gave the stupidest and most carefree giggle so far. Kili couldn't help laughing in return. For a moment they paused where they were, but Kili didn't feel angry as he often did when people professed to know more than him. There was a comforting fire in his belly. He was thrilled with anticipation for something he couldn't even name. And then he remembered how much trouble he would be in and he took a step back into the corridor, turned and hurried away.

 

11.

He went back to his room. Fili was sitting on his window sill, gazing out over the sunless, unchanging lights of the city. They were like stars from here, arrayed in lines like crowns and hanging strings. They could not see the deep mines, nor the refuse pits, nor the streets of cheapside from here; in later months Kili would find he would not have been be able to pick out the warm lights of Dori’s restaurant even with a hawk’s eyes, and as it turned out, Ori’s window looked out over a brick wall and an alley full of refuse. Erebor had many halls and it took many years to learn that not all of them were grand and beautiful. 

Tonight Fili did not look over as the door opened. Kili could see that there was a tense set to his shoulders.

“Am I in t-t-trouble?” Kili asked, levering himself up onto the sill to sit across from his brother.

Fili glanced towards him. His eyes seemed hollow, to be looking through Kili. His expression was on the verge of breaking, and then he swallowed and seemed to pull himself together. He forced a smile, “The worst trouble, little brother.”

“I d-d-don’t c-care,” Kili pouted, leaning back against the bars of the window. He kicked his foot lightly against Fili’s leg. “W-what’s wrong w-w… y-you?”

Fili looked quickly out over the city again. “I heard – I heard the boys at school saying –” he shook his head. “We can’t trust anyone, brother. Not a single one of them.”

He never finished the story. It was one of those things that Kili meant to ask him, years later, when he thought the sting would have faded. But it never came up. 

After a long moment, Fili got up and grabbed Kili’s hand. “Come on. We’re going to see Uncle Thorin.”

Kili protested and begged and whined, but Fili insisted it would be alright. He dragged him all the way to Thorin’s huge study behind the throne room, set back high above the city in the solid bedrock of the palace, the marbled walls lined with books and bulging cabinets. Thorin was sorting through piles of papers and he did not even glance up as they entered. He always knew the sound of their footsteps.

“Go away, boys. I’m busy,” he said at once.

“It won’t wait,” Fili said. Thorin looked up. Fili stood in front, his arms crossed. He was many years away from coming of age and his beard was not even a prickle on his cheeks, but he was already close to reaching his full height. He lifted his chin. 

He told Thorin that both of them must be taken out of school and given private lessons. He told Thorin about how the teachers treated Kili, how the other boys teased him and pushed him, how the stutter had come about as a result of his maltreatment. Kili squirmed and hung his head as Fili exposed his weaknesses one after the other. He was sure Thorin would simply tell him he was being pathetic and send him back. Finally, their uncle raised his hand.

“Is this true, Kili?” he asked.

“Y-y-yes, Th-thorin,” Kili mumbled.

“Speak clearly. Don’t stammer,” Thorin growled.

He was silent. Thorin tilted his head, “Speak, Kili.”

Kili raised his head. He would not cry. He would not. Not in front of Thorin. He said, “I c-c-can’t.”

Thorin pulled them out of school.

 

12.

The private tutors were numerous and varied, but they were as different as they could possibly have been from the school teachers. Balin was in charge, organising the other lessons on a week-to-week basis according to where he deemed the boys lacking in and what he thought would hold their attention. He spoke to his charges like adults and listened when they spoke back. There was discontent from Amma – she did not like Balin, because he was the brother of the infamous general who had helped Mama – but Thorin held firm in his choice. Balin’s father was a war hero who had taught him and Frerin much of what they knew, and the family deserved a chance to eke back the honour that the traitor Dwalin had lost. 

Kili flourished under the private tutors. He was still expected to swing one-handed weapons with his right hand because it would be necessary in battle, but his sword master patiently let him move through the lessons ambidextrously, learning his strengths with his left before he repeated it with his right. His archery teacher didn’t care at all what side he shot with, and Kili took to archery very quickly as a result. Soon, his stutter faded and then disappeared entirely, only returning occasionally when he was very nervous. 

Their new regime gave them a lot of free time, and most afternoons they were released to do as they pleased. Most of this time they spent together, travelling outside to spend long hours exploring the forest that clothed the Lonely Mountain, hunting or swimming if the weather allowed it. Sometimes they would dress up in the plainest clothes they could find and wander the streets of the city. They had to be careful not to be caught by any of the family on the way out, because then they would be forcibly accompanied by guards, which rather ruined the thrill of exploring the dingy lower quarters. 

But very often Fili had extra homework, martial forms and stances he had to get perfect, or history and philosophy books he was supposed to be reading, and so Kili took such opportunities to visit the library. He would wait in the shelves for Ori to pass during his rounds with the shelving trolley. He was very careful not to be seen too much in the library; he did not like the idea of other people knowing about his friendship with Ori. The reasons for this were like many-headed beast in his mind, striking and receding in a fog. Partly it felt like a guilty secret, something precious that the rest of the family would not approve of – because Ori was poor, because Ori was common, or perhaps because Ori was kind and that was not something the family ever seemed to trust. In particular Kili was sure that Frerin (in his cruelty) and Amma (in her loving jealousy) might have made life difficult for the young librarian if they had known. 

Ori himself seemed to have had similar thoughts. When he finally brought Kili home one day, he quickly agreed that they should not use Kili’s real name outside of the palace. In Ori’s house he went by Ginnar and pretended to be a second cousin of the head librarian. And they soon became the most liberating days of his young life.

Ori’s house was cramped and small, a hodge-podge of mismatched rooms above his brother Dori’s restaurant, which was little more than a well-decorated cavity in the city wall. His brothers argued constantly but doted on Ori and welcomed Kili in as if he’d been there for years. At first they warily admired him as if he was a piece of art that Ori had brought home – his clothes and bearing must have made his status more obvious than he’d ever thought – but soon they bantered and bickered with him as easily as they did with each other. In the beginning Kili lost his temper quite often. He’d never had people speak back to him and contradict him so frankly. But soon he saw that Dori and Nori thought less of him or simply laughed the more offended he got, and he realised how silly it was to take it all personally. He rolled with their insults and slowly, steadily, learned to speak his mind without resorting to shouts and sulks. 

He still preferred his conversations with Ori, though. Everything was different with Ori. It was not like speaking to servants, who agreed with everything or stayed silent. Nor was it like talking to Amma or Frerin or their more distant relatives, where one had to constantly be on one’s guard for traps and tricks, and say nothing of value, knowing that nothing that was said would stay a secret. Kili could say anything he liked to Ori and loved to hear everything that Ori had to say in return. When they were in company they still wanted to hide Kili’s identity, however, and so developed endless inside jokes and word-plays that danced around the truth, until they had almost a whole language running under their normal conversation. They would often break into fits of laughter at some obscure inneundo while Dori and Nori stared blankly at them and Ori’s mother shouted from her chair for them to explain the joke. 

Ori’s mother was a wrinkled globe of a woman, dressed in several flowing layers of loose gowns and dresses, her huge arms and thighs spilling out of her faded armchair. She had been a tough and muscled builder once, Ori said, able to hammer an iron peg into granite with only three blows, but when he was a baby she’d fallen from a scaffold and hit her head badly. She slept up to twenty hours a day now. Headaches and forgetfulness dogged her every waking moment, and she could not focus on building so much as a house of cards for more than a few minutes. But her eyes still sparkled and her wit was as sharp ever. 

She was the one who eventually figured out who Kili really was. Maybe she could hear their jokes better than Dori and Nori or maybe Kili just slipped up, dropped some fatal clue while he was telling Ori about his day. She told Ori’s brothers, of course, seeking Dori’s council on the danger of his friendship with a prince and how to handle it. Dori must have decided that they shouldn't oppose a prince, because he assured Kili that he was still welcome in their house. But things were never quite the same after that. 

 

13.

In their thirties, Kili was accepted into the scouts’ academy while Fili entered officer’s training for the army. Back with high-born peers for the first time, Kili found himself far better off than he had as a child in school. Sleeping in cold barracks and training six to ten hours a day bound all the cadets together in the common goal of protecting and defending Erebor, and also in a lot of games involving fire and hiding smuggled mead in increasingly more creative places. There were rivalries and spats on occasion, but they were not malicious. Kili’s fellows were aware of his position as fourth in line of the throne, but once it became clear that he didn’t expect special treatment they treated him like any other trainee. 

He saw Fili only a couple of times a week, on their day off or when the young officers’ dinners coincided with the scouts’ meals. Kili always forgot how much he missed him in between those times. He was busy constantly, not just with official training but with trying to fit in, mimicking the way the other scouts spoke and treated each other. And then he would see the burst of Fili’s gold hair across a hall or feel a familiar hand on his shoulder and at once, instantly, the rest of the world dropped away and was filled up with his brother, both of them talking non-stop, Fili trying to pinch his ears and Kili trying to pull his braids out. He was not unhappy when Fili was absent, but as soon as they were in the same room everything changed. He felt normal again. He felt whole.

He missed Ori, though. There was no chance of getting to the library or into the depths of Erebor’s slums, especially not in his distinctive scouts’ uniform. He wrote letters to Ori in the evenings, and got many back in return. Ori wrote better than him – every word seemed more cleverly chosen, every phrase more elegant, even the letters themselves perfectly formed – but Ori insisted he enjoyed Kili’s letter immensely (he said the spelling mistakes were endearing). 

It never seemed strange to Kili that the rest of the cadets, if they wrote often, were sending their letters to sisters and sweethearts. Kili wrote perfunctory letters to Amma and Balin to let them know he was well and working hard, but they might as well have been public notices to pin to boards. He never wrote to Fili. He felt he did not need to, and not just because they saw each other so often. We was sure, without ever thinking it in such words, that Fili always knew how he was feeling.

 

14\. 

Thrain was not happy that Thorin had allowed the princes to join the military schools. He feared another coup. His daughter had created the greatest threat to his dominion since Smaug the Terrible had wiped out a third of Erebor’s population and killed King Thror and Thrain’s wife many years earlier. But Smaug was an enemy of all dwarves, whereas Dis had divided the nation – and so Thrain cultivated a deep hatred for her that seemed to grow sharper through the years rather than fading. 

Fili and Kili did not see the king often. He was always “on important business” or “locked in deliberations” or “replenishing his strength”. What exactly this business was and how Thrain resolved it, Kili didn’t know. Nobody needed to tell him that Thorin was in charge of most of the day-to-day running of Erebor. Thorin ate at his desk most nights and walked everywhere with a flock of clerks and messengers. He had never visited his nephews in their own rooms nor even looked in on their name-day parties. He did not have time to watch their progress in the gymnasiums nor listen to their stories. Thorin had time for one thing only, and that was being a king without actually being a king. Thrain was the one-eyed face of the monarchy, the man who led parades and watched army drills and shouted at courtiers. He seemed to make decisions – he declared that the law must become this or the treasury must pay for that or the people must change their ways – but how such decisions were carried into reality was almost certainly through Thorin’s hands. 

Once or twice a month the princes were still expected to family dinners, which Thrain often made an appearance at. He had grown heavy over the years, his hair streaked thick with grey, but beneath the rotund belly from his rich diet he was still strong as an ox. Kili had once seen him throw a dwarf over the railing of a mezzanine floor because the man would not shut up while Thrain was trying to speak to a bosomy duchess from the Blue Mountains. He smiled broadly during family feasts, but it only made Kili hunch lower in his chair. 

He knew that the broader the king smiled, the more quickly he might begin to shout and thump his fists. Conversation at these dinners was rather like trying to cross a frozen lake on the cusp of spring. Even Frerin watched his tongue in his grandfather’s presence. Only Thrain never curtailed his thoughts. There was one evening he came straight out and ordered Thorin to be married and produce more heirs.

“I don’t want that bitch’s whelps taking over when I’m gone,” he roared, waving his goblet at where his grandsons sat at the other end of the table.

Fili and Kili did not react to this at all. It was just the sort of thing Thrain said. They had gotten used to it. Only Amma clicked her tongue and leaned across to put her arm on her the king’s hand. “Don’t use that language at the table, my darling,” she said coldly.

“I’ll use whatever language I like, mother,” Thrain barked. But he did not, Kili noticed, swear again that evening. 

Meanwhile, Frerin had raised his head. “I could get married, Grandpapa,” he said brightly. “That would work, wouldn’t it?”

 

15\. 

Frerin married a pale-skinned, black-haired girl from Borin’s line, albeit by marriage. She spoke in a small, squeaky voice and simply smiled if someone said something she didn’t understand or subtly insulted her, as the court dwarves often did. Her reticence made her difficult to talk to and nobody was very kind to her, except Amma, who bossed her about and demanded her company when Frerin was not around. 

Two years after the marriage, Frerin’s wife began to grow ill. It was consumption, the royal physicians said, moving unusually fast. When it grew so bad she could not walk, they took her into isolation and she was tended and watched over constantly by a flock of nurses. She seemed to recover after a fortnight, even returning to court for a few of days before she went home to the rooms she shared with her husband. But within the month she had sickened again and finally died suddenly during a festival day.

Kili didn’t think much of it at the time, but looking back, he felt a terrible guilt that he did not even remember her name unless someone mentioned her.

 

16\. 

At around the same time that Frerin’s first wife died, Ori’s mother began to get pain in her bones and sicken. When he had a day off, Kili visited the house and gave Ori money for a doctor despite his protests, calling it an early name-day present. Ori began to cry at that, which shocked Kili right through to his heart – he had never seen Ori cry. He awkwardly put his arms around his friend and stroked his hair, the way he remembered Amma sometimes doing when he’d been a child. Dori found them and took the money with a mumbled thanks. Kili could see that it hurt him to do so, and he didn’t understand why. He had so much, and he had been eating their food for years without paying them anything for it. 

Nori left two days later and did not come back. Ori’s mother fell into an unbreakable sleep. Her last words were to ask whether Nori had come home yet and she died within a couple of days. Kili never saw the middle brother again. 

He was training on the day of the funeral, but by luck he had the next day off. The restaurant was closed and strung with white, ceramic mourning-tiles. Dori let him into the house and he went straight up to the room that Ori had shared with Nori for as long as Kili could remember. 

Ori sat curled on his bed, which as in most common dwarf households was a flat mattress on the rug-covered floor and was usually rolled away for day use of the room. Instead it had been left open and unmade and Ori had scrunched himself up on top of the duvet like a dirty sheet.

Kili did not know what to do. He had never seen grief; emotional displays were considered distasteful in court, and the strength to appear unmoved was expected of any male relatives of the dead. Frerin had been drinking and boasting at parties only hours after his wife had died, and of course after his own Mama was executed, they were not even supposed to acknowledge her absence. But it hurt Kili to see Ori so broken down, so he moved to sit beside him. Ori pulled him close and clung to him. He rocked and wept into Kili’s chest, his movements slow and aimless as a newborn pup. He was so heavy that Kili had to lie back against the wall, and Ori buried his face against the curve of Kili’s neck. His sobs subsided. For a while they stayed like that. Ori’s hand found Kili’s and their fingers entwined. Kili’s thumb rubbed across Ori’s knuckle over and over and he felt as if the mere smell of Ori was provoking an intense emotion in him that he couldn’t name, that he had no frame of reference for. And then Ori broke away from him suddenly, wiping his eyes, apologising.

“It’s fine,” Kili said. “I’m sure she’d rather you cried than you didn’t.”

Ori laughed and called him horrid for thinking of it like that. Shortly he stood up and began to pace, raging at Nori, at the doctors, at the unfairness that his mother had never seen the grandchildren she’d always longed for. He had started on Nori again when he suddenly stopped, his mouth snapping closed.

In the next moment, he was on the carpet. It was as if an invisible wraith had seized him and was bending him like a bough in a high wind. His arms were held stiff by his side and his back arched, and then released again, and arched, his eyes rolling into the back of his head and a low rumble emanating from his throat like a growl.

Kili tried to hold Ori’s straining limbs down and screamed for Dori, who came up the stairs from the kitchen at a gallop. He grabbed a pilow from the crumpled bed and pushed Kili off.

“Don’t hold him down!” he scolded Kili, lifting Ori’s head to tuck the pillow beneath. 

“What’s wrong with him?” Kili croaked, clutching his collar. His clothes felt too tight and hot. A trail of drool slipped from the corner of Ori’s mouth. Dori shook his head, his hands resting at Ori’s temples as if cupping a baby bird. 

“Dori, t-tell me!”

Dori lifted his eyes. “He has these fits,” he murmured. “Once or twice a year since he was a lad.”

For several minutes the shaking continued. Kili pulled his legs into his chest and wrapped his arms around his knees as it went on, Ori’s throat making a strange crooning that seemed completely disconnected from Ori himself, as if there was some sick, dark spirit inside him trying to get out. To go so quickly from that moment of intimacy to this, to his friend lying possessed upon the floor – it was as if someone had slapped Kili so hard in the face that he himself had fallen. 

Slowly the fit subsided like the earth settling after a landslide, Ori’s limbs thrown wide as if he was sleeping through a nightmare. At last his eyes opened, and Dori seemed to come alive with his baby brother. He sent Kili to get the bucket from the laundry, but Kili had never been through the cupboards there and he didn’t quite make it back before Ori threw up into his brother’s lap. He was dozy and apologetic, pink-cheeked as he mumbled in Kili’s direction as if he had embarassed himself by drinking too much wine.

It explained a lot about why Dori had always been so insistent that Ori not take on a labourer’s or smithy’s trade. It was still a shock, somehow, that Ori had kept such a secret from Kili.

 

17.

It was a season for bad omens, the winter Ori’s mother died. A rare coal seam was discovered under the east arm of the mountain, but the Erebor miners were not used to mining coal and a fire from a broken lantern almost grew out of control. Unquenchable infernos in coal pits had left whole cities uninhabitable in the past. They got lucky this time; Thorin was in the area checking on production and managed to rally enough dwarves to break in a thin ceiling and redirect a creek into the mine before the fumes reached the neighbouring tunnels. He returned to the palace drenched from head to toe and black with soot. Within the hour he was clean, his hair rebraided, his new clothes spotless. Only a faint redness in his smoke-stung eyes remained.

The Cult of Mahal took to the streets, chanting for the Creator’s protection. When two young dwarrowdams were found naked and strangled in a refuse pit beneath the city, the chants turned to pleading for the king to bring his people back towards the ways that Mahal had meant them to live. Thorin arranged a team from the city watch to search for the murderer, but Thrain insisted that no killer would be found, that the dams were simply the worst manifestation of sin and idleness among Erebor. He wanted to know how to make his people better; the Cult of Mahal were happy to send priests to advise him. 

 

18\. 

Old Gamil retired the next year. He had been in charge of the outer city guard, the first major line of defense if Erebor should ever come under attack. Fili put his name forward as a candidate for the position, though he was the youngest by far and knew he had only an outside change. He asked Thorin personally to consider him. He felt ready to lead.

When Thorin delivered the candidate list to the king with Fili’s name at the bottom, Thrain panicked. He brought the whole palace to a standstill, locking down his quarters, calling his reserve guard to defend him and accusing every courtier that tried to calm him of treason. He said Fili would turn against him and kill him. Finally Thorin was admitted to the king’s rooms to try and calm his father’s fears.

Both Fili and Kili were pulled out of the army within hours. Frerin, who in fairness was far more experienced and familiar with leading the troops, would be raised to the captain of the outer guards instead. Kili was irritated by the news, wondering what he was supposed to do with his time after so many years of the strict scouts’ routine, and so close to being admitted to the patrols. He felt adrift, or as if he was trying to hit a moving target made of smoke. After searching for Fili in vain, he grabbed his cloak and stormed out of the palace and down the city streets to Ori’s house. He had found little time to visit in the past few months, but he barely noticed how thin and grey Ori seemed. He ranted and raged at his grandfather, calling him demented and a drooling old fool.

Dori sat in the kitchen watching Kili with a sour look on his face. With Ori staying so quiet, Kili turned on Dori at last.

“What?” he snapped. “Are you so loyal to the monarchy you think I’m wrong?”

Dori sneered at him. “We don’t have the choice,” he said. “If I said such words outside that door or in front of my customers, I could be arrested and hung by dawn.”

Kili fell silent. He went to stand over Ori, gripping his shoulder. “Are you ill?” he asked, trying to keep the bitterness out of his tone. He was the aggrieved party, after all. Why couldn’t Dori just let them be alone? Why was he standing there with that wrinkle between his brows?

“I’m fine,” Ori put his hand over Kili’s and turned his face up towards him. There were shadows under his eyes.

Dori said sharply, “His fits are growing more frequent. He’s had to stop work at the library,” and Ori got up and shouted at him that they’d agreed not to tell, and why was Dori being such a boar around Kili these days? A row started up, as bad as the ones that Dori and Nori used to have when the house had still been full. Kili had never seen Ori fight with his older brothers. And he did not miss the edge of exhaustion in Ori’s tone.

It was all too raw. It felt like the wrong time to be there. He excused himself as soon as he could and hurried back to the palace.

All the news had well and truly done the rounds by the time he snuck in the kitchen doors and found someone to repeat the gossip. Fili had been ordered to remain in court at all times and to study only in law and politics. Kili found him on the highest balustrade of the palace, sharpening his sword over and over until it was too much, until it was clear he was simply weakening the blade.

The loss of his career, so swift and in such a moment of hopeful ambition, was a crushing blow for Kili’s brother. It must have been that – the loss, the void – that catalysed everything that happened next.

 

19\. 

Two days later, they went out the main gate and took ponies around the west road. From there they turned north into the wilder hills that backed the cold side of Erebor. It was summer outside of the stone halls and the air was mild as it rippled through the grass at the edge of the tree-line. They left the ponies at a tarn and raced each other down the slopes, tripping and rolling back onto their feet until they were both overheating in their outdoor clothes, faces pink and lungs heaving with laughter. 

“We’ve been soldiers too long,” Kili groaned, collapsing down onto the tussocks. He’d taken several tumbles near the finishing line and the sky spun around him, a clear orb bluer than even the brightest sapphires. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to play.”

“You want to go back to being a spoiled brat?” Fili asked, flopping down beside him. He propped himself up on his elbows and stared away at the jagged teeth of Ered Mithrin. “Shall we try it? We can dress in silks and furs like courtiers and demand anything that comes to mind, throw tantrums when we don’t get it.”

“Thorin would kill us,” Kili sniggered. “Grandpapa is difficult enough.”

“Fuck Thorin,” said Fili. His tone was grey-black as the far-off peaks. Kili looked up at him, at the grim line of his mouth beneath the short braids of his new moustache. “And the rest of the family. They can all fall down a mine shaft for all I care.”

_…dragon ash and heads on pikes…_

“It’s alright,” Kili smoothed his thumb along the soft line of golden fur beneath Fili’s nose, trying to push the corner of his mouth back into a smile. “We’re not like them. We’ll never be like them. They’re all alone and we’ll always have each other.”

“I know,” Fili murmured, breaking off a grass stalk and tossing it to the wind. He looked down at Kili, his lips sliding absent-mindedly against Kili’s palm as his head turned. With a sigh he leaned down into the grass and pressed his face to Kili’s, cheek-to-cheek like Amma greeting her old, widowed cousins. His torso was heavy and languid against Kili’s chest and his arm snaked around Kili’s shoulders.

And then his mouth was pressing close against the prickle of Kili’s chin, and moving to meet Kili’s mouth. Kili flinched and made a noise – a soft grunt of surprise, but Fili gripped his face and his lips were against Kili’s, wet and pushing in and Kili could feel so much, so suddenly, that it overwhelmed him and he let it happen. His hand lifted and clutched Fili’s shoulder, but he didn’t know why, because now he wasn’t letting it happen, he was helping, or his body was helping. He felt so saturated in the movement of Fili’s mouth that he didn’t even think twice when Fili shifted closer and swung one leg over Kili’s hips, and suddenly all the blood in Kili's body was pooling there.

For a few minutes he went still, but for his lips still moving, shifting over Fili's wet mouth. He felt as if he was in a faint, as if he'd suddenly been turned on his head and could not right himself. And then Fili's hands were on the buckles of his coat, pulling it open, tugging at buttons to tear his shirt down over his shoulders. Kili's arms were trapped against his sides and his breath quickened. Fili kissed the pulse in his neck, and Kili jerked with a gasp as Fili's leg slid up the inside of his thigh, feeling the heat of muscles on muscles even through two layers of clothing. He didn't understand what was happening, not really.

But Fili must know what he was doing, Kili thought. Fili always knew what he was doing. And it felt so much like the right thing to do.


	2. Fidelity

01.

All Kili’s hours were shore leave now. 

The day after he and Fili took the ponies across the north slope of the Lonely Mountain, he wrapped a scarf around his face and went down through the city to visit Ori. The restaurant was packed full for lunch hour and the back door was locked, but Kili knew where Dori kept the key – beneath the mourning tile that hung above the yard shrine to Mahal, or sometimes under the incense bowl itself. He crept inside. Ori was upstairs sitting at his brick-facing window, sketching in a book of rough paper that Kili had given him for the name-day before his mother died.

He looked up as Kili came in, starting a little before he smiled. “I didn’t hear you. You _are_ a proper scout.”

Kili should have said something – would have said something – some banter in response. But his hands were shaking as he pulled down his scarf and stepped closer to Ori. His tongue felt dry and heavy in his mouth.

“Can I… m-m-may I try s-something for you, Ori?” he asked. He had not stuttered, not once, for several years now.

Ori frowned. “For me? What does that mean?”

“If I g-g-got it wrong, please forgive me,” Kili said. 

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Ori replied.

They were inches apart now. From where he sat on the sill, Ori’s face was just below Kili’s. And Kili leaned down and kissed him, his hand cupping Ori’s jaw. 

Ori hesitated for a heartbeat and a half. And then his hands dug into Kili’s hair and pulled him in. He made several small, hiccoughing noises in his throat and then pulled away.

“I thought – I didn’t – when did you know?” Ori whispered. His fingers were still tangled in Kili’s hair, gripping as if in a panic, as if he would fall to his death if he let go.

Kili shook his head and kissed him again, pulling impatiently at the button of Ori’s big, woollen sweater. 

 

02\. 

He didn’t equate it with courtship. He didn’t think of it in the terms and words he’d heard to describe acts of marriage, and sometimes pre-marriage. His mind never even brushed across the ideals of dwarven monogamy. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t anything to do with that. Marriage and fidelity were all about politics and prestige and investments in the future. This was different. This was inescapable.

But still, he told neither Fili nor Ori about each other.

 

03\. 

The top physician in the palace was an old dwarf named Oin, half deaf even though he wasn’t yet close to Thrain’s age, but with an infectious cackle that put his patients at ease. Kili went to him and told him a story about how one of the servants’ sons was having fits, and was there anything to help him?

He had never seen Oin look so grim. He listened in silence as Kili repeated what Dori and Ori himself had told him about the fits. “The Falling Sickness is very grave, lad,” Oin nodded at last. “Some children grow out of it – but in some the throes grow worse and worse.” 

He suggested a number of herbal preparations that he’d heard of from other healers. Kili had him write everything down. Oin noted the amount of this to chew or how to cook that and when to drink this, and marked the ones that could only be imported from far away at great expense, suggesting Kili try the others first.

One after another Kili worked his way through the list. He would turn up at Dori’s restaurant at all hours carrying some new package that had just arrived or which he just found at an obscure apothecary downtown. Some tasted so foul Kili didn’t even want to smell them. One or two made Ori sick. But Kili bullied and wheedled him into trying each new remedy anyway. Sometimes a month or two months would go by without Ori falling to the floor and Kili swore it was working working. But Ori still complained that his arms moved all on their own, or that he felt as if he was reliving every moment as it happened, which he insisted was a weaker echo of the sickness. Sooner or later a real shake would come and leave him senseless for seconds or minutes or longer, and Kili would cross another medicine off his list. Dori’s dark looks and snorts of skepticism grew more noticeable each time Kili turned up at the house clutching an oilskin bag or a box of wax-sealed bottles.

“I’m trying to help!” Kili told him angrily, as Ori knelt over the now familiar bucket, a few hours after trying to eat the latest root with his dinner.

“You think we haven’t tried everything?” Dori snapped. “You think you can care for my brother better than I can? Look at him, look what you’re doing to him. Why do you feel like every fit he has is some personal insult to you?”

Kili stayed in the house that night for the first time, curled against Ori’s back once his friend had finally fallen asleep. He watched his laboured breathing and found his own lungs falling into sync. Perhaps Dori was right. Perhaps he had been given everything he wanted for so long that he was treating Ori’s health like some toy he’d been denied, and this was just another childish tantrum. But then he thought of Ori in the library, walking around with an open book in one hand while he shelved with the other, Ori so proud of his knowledge of obscure writers from three centuries ago, Ori running to market and back to get his brother some ingredient before the customer even complained that his meal was late, Ori plotting to find Dori a wife one of these days because Dori so loved children. And Ori’s descriptions of his mother in her youth – handsome and boisterous and strong. Kili had never seen her like that. He had only seen her long after her injury. 

But Kili could fix this. Kili could give his friend back his life.

Ori threw up only once more than night. He half-collapsed back onto the mattress beside Kili. They pressed in close, Ori trying to tug the blanket back up over both of them and giving up with a sigh because he ached too much. Kili tucked his chin against Ori’s neck. 

“Nothing’s going to work,” Ori whispered in the shadows. “If there was something that worked, we’d know about it. The elves would be selling it by the truckload, or your healer would have told you straight away.”

“I don’t believe that,” Kili rasped. “We’ll try something new the day after tomorrow, when you’re eating again.”

“Kili—”

“One more medicine.”

“No,” Ori shook his head. “No more, Kili. I’m not going to be a great warrior like you, I’m not going to build cities or ride galloping ponies across the plains. Let me lie at home and get fat like my mother. It has more dignity than poisoning myself one weed at a time.”

Kili pressed his lips to the pulse of Ori’s neck. “Let me make you feel good, then you can decide.”

“Don’t start, I’m too tired, I smell foul—”

“Trust me,” Kili whispered. “Just lie there, I’ll take care of it. Trust me, I want to.”

He was wriggling down the mattress as he spoke, prying at the cloth-covered buttons of Ori’s vest. Ori grumbled but then fell silent as Kili pushed his shirt aside and kissed the trail of hair on his belly, and then down, down. 

He waited until Ori was gasping, one hand entwined in Kili’s hair and his hips jerking, before he raised his head.

“Kili!” Ori squeaked. “I’m not _done_ , you beast!” 

“Promise me,” said Kili, smoothing one hand across the fur of Ori’s belly. “Promise me you’ll try one more.”

“Yes. Fine. Yes!”

Kili finished him, and finished him well. Ori bit down on his own hand and then finally lay gasping. Kili was hard and flushed as he crawled up to lie beside Ori again, but he didn’t feel any urge to touch himself. He was too elated with himself, happy to lie and let it fade as he slept beside Ori.

“Where did you learn that?” Ori asked, with a laugh in his tone.

Kili froze, his heart pounding, and then made himself shrug. “I just heard about it somewhere.”

 

04.

The next summer, Frerin married again. This time his bride was a stout girl with a loud voice, classically beautiful in the rocky, thick-haired way that dwarven maidens should be. Her name was Sund. Her mother was a Broadbeam, her father the head of an old family that could trace its lordship back to Moria. She was not clever, but she knew it, and her pride and willingness to learn made her likeable from the moment she stepped foot in court after the wedding. She adored Frerin, as she was happy to tell anyone who would listen. She adored the architecture of the palace and the mighty halls of Thrain’s throne room and the great feasts of the dwarven nobility. Loud and flighty from conversation to conversation, Sund brought a glow to the palace like a new gem hewn out of the rock.

By the end of the season she was pregnant. Amma was alight with joy that infected the whole court and spread throughout the city. Bakers made buns shaped like wombs or wrapped babes, tinkers and tailors everywhere designed new wares with Frerin and Sund’s entwined crests upon them: buttons and banners and scarves to be worn and hung above doorways by anyone who kept up with the city fashions.

Frerin alone did not seem to join in the celebrations. He complained constantly that Sund was not taking enough care, was not being protected well enough. He said people must stop smoking pipes near his wife, must not wear bright colours that could bring on a migraine, must stop talking so loudly – at which point Sund finally challenged him by talking loudest of anyone. Frerin started to insist that their rooms in the palace were too small and musty. Kili’s apartment had more windows, so he moved out and let the royal couple take his place. He was happy to go – he shared Fili’s quarters instead, agreeing that Frerin’s rooms were too damp. 

Too damp, too cold, too empty. Kili’s skin was instead overheating all the time. He coasted through his days without remembering them, thinking always of the hour when there came the dimming of the candles and the palace retired for the evening, of shutting the door and going to Fili and exploring, testing, learning. He felt frightened every time, walking those few steps across the rug. Sometimes he couldn’t stop shaking afterwards. Sometimes he felt sick, wondering how long Fili had waited for this, wondering if they’d broken something that couldn’t be mended. 

The cadets in the scouts had talked of sex – boasting of the dams they’d had (that always lived on the far side of town now), and even trading stories of self-pleasure, of the wildest heights that unmarried dwarves went to in their quest to debase themselves. But he had never known bodies had such sensation to be awakened. It was like the first time he’d felt the rain, seen the sky filled with the broiling storm. How could there be so much he didn’t know until now? 

He always crept back to sleep in his own bed soon enough. Sometimes the servants came in early in the mornings. It wouldn’t do to be seen in Fili’s bed – he didn’t know what people would think.

(He didn’t want to know). 

 

05.

Thrain’s moods began to swing to new heights and lows. He would clap his hands when he saw Sund, kiss her brow and ask after her health every time, declaring her his Princess, his daughter, the garden of his lineage. Yet Thorin seemed grimmer and more strained than ever, and they all knew why – out of sight of the court, Thrain regularly fell into rages or despair. He feared, beyond all reason, that the new babe would be born a traitor. He even declared during one family dinner – thankfully one in which neither Sund nor Frerin were present – that if it was a girl, he would order it drowned at once, just to be sure. Nobody contended him on this. He would almost certainly forget his words by tomorrow; better not to cement them in the king’s mind by arguing with him.

Kili found himself by Thorin’s side very often in those days. His uncle’s eyes were hung with deep shadows and he often called Kili to help him carry the king back into his chambers after Thrain had drunk himself unconscious. Sometimes he was not unconscious, but simply senseless with grief. It was clear from the way Thorin cleaned him and cared for him that this was nothing new. Very often in his depressions, the king would talk about Dis. They were never kind words, but they were a father’s words all the same. Sometimes in his delusions he even clutched Kili’s arm and asked Kili to carry some message to his mother, usually new excuses about why Thrain had had her killed, why she had deserved it, why she would never be welcome in the afterlife to sit with their ancestors stretching back to Durin. 

“Do you miss her?” Kili asked Thorin one night, after they had softly shut the door to the snoring King’s bedroom. Thorin looked at him sharply, and then lowered his gaze.

“Every hour of every day,” he said. “She was–” he shook his head. “It matters not. Time has eaten her up.”

The answer surprised Kili. His only memories of Thorin and his mother were of their fights. He had assumed Thorin to be a ready participant in quelling Dis’ rebellion. But he should have known that in their family, the truth was buried under layers and layers of half-truths and lies and lesser secrets. And perhaps, like a pearl, the heart of the truth was nothing but an ugly grain of sand.

 

06.

Amma visited Sund constantly towards the end of the pregnancy. Their great-grandmother had already ordered scores of garments made for the new babe, all of the finest lace and the warmest wools from the distant farms of men, dyed with the softest colours. Kili went with her one day to help her carry a new shipment of quilts, and he was there when Sund – with trepidation marring her usual beaming confidence – told Amma that just now she’d realised the babe was coming.

Amma tossed up her hands and praised Mahal. She threw down the quilts and sent Kili running to call the midwife and the physicians and tell Frerin and make sure no one else found out, not yet. Kili was fairly sure that as soon as one of the servants saw him sprinting through the palace, the rumours would burst open like a broken beehive, but he did as his great-grandmother bade.

He found Frerin first, and then gave the message over to one of Amma’s handmaidens who had come hurrying along the hall. The handmaiden went to find Oin the physician and Kili turned back towards Sund’s rooms.

He returned to find Amma alone in the atrium, her hands knotted in her lap. He paused to catch his breath, frowning at the closed door that led through two dens into the bedroom.

“Is Sund alright?” he asked.

Amma smiled with her lips pressed tight. “Oh yes, my dear. Frerin’s gone in to help her get ready.”

Kili nodded, taking two steps towards the door. He knew, without needing to check, that if he put his hand on it he would find it locked. Amma blathered on, “A new child, Kili, think of it! Thror would be so proud to see it. It will be a boy, I know it. He will be king above your brother – but Fili will understand, it must be so. I will always love you all, my darlings.”

“Amma,” Kili turned towards her. “How long have they been in there?”

“Not long,” Amma said very quickly.

Kili frowned at the door. And a moment later, there were thudding footsteps, the sound of a fumbled lock, and Frerin threw it open, his face alight and a strange, wild expression on his face.

“Something’s wrong!” he cried. “Call the healers, call them all! My wife – my wife is not breathing–”

Oin arrived with his satchel within a minute, along with assistants and a midwife and maids and messengers. He came upon the sight of the princess Sund lying on her marriage bed, her lips blue and her eyes wide as Kili and Amma tried frantically to wake her. He sent at once for his surgical tools, and pushed the royal relatives to the edge of the room. Frerin would not leave his wife’s side, clutching her hand and stroking her hair, his eyes still wide and his mouth still pulled into a strange grimace that looked almost like a smile. Oin tore her beautiful silk dress asunder and cut into her like fresh meat for the feast. 

There was blood, dark and sluggish. The child was lifted from Sund’s belly. It was limp and grey and smeared with the ichors of the body. It did not cry, but Frerin did, wailing and cursing as he snatched his baby son from Oin’s hands.

“He’s alive!” Frerin cried, rocking back and forth over the unmoving handful of granite-blue meat. “He must be, he must be, I wanted him, I wanted him alive!”

“I’m sorry, my prince,” Oin stepped away, his head hanging low. “If you’ll let me, I might—”

“No!” Frerin snarled, clutching his dead child to his chest. “You’ve done enough. You came too late, you came too late. It’s your fault!”

Kili felt tears on his cheeks and bit down on his lip. He put his arm around Amma. They stood and waited as Frerin’s screaming died down to sobbing mewls. He sat on the edge of the bed above his wife, rocking back and forth over the babe in his bloody hands. Its chord trailed across the blankets.

Kili helped the servants move Sund’s body and tidy the room as best they could. Her face was wracked in a frozen expression of pain, brow still furrowed and one lip bitten through. The blood was drying on the bitten lip like paint. Kili lifted up a pillow from the floor and found a single speck of drying blood in the centre of it. He saw, and he thought – but no – it couldn’t be so. Frerin wouldn’t have—

There was no rhyme or reason behind such an idea. He pushed it away. 

 

07.

The city mourned Sund, hanging the white ceramics on their doors and lintels, closing their shops for two days (though if you needed something and knocked, there was usually someone to serve you; most people could not afford to lose two days of commerce). But Frerin came to the next family dinner as usual. His face was stern but his step was light.

“It’s alright, grandfather,” he said when the king, in a moment of unusal sensitivity, gave his condolences for Frerin’s loss. “I will stay strong. There will be another wife for me, though none can replace Sund in my heart.”

“No, there will not,” said Amma, her spoon clinking on her soup dish. Kili raised his head and the conversation between Fili and Thorin fell silent. Amma put her spoon down and dabbed her mouth with her napkin. She smiled warmly, “Your grief is too great, Frerin my love. You shall not be allowed any more wives. For your health.” 

Frerin’s lip tugged back in a snarl. “You are not my keeper, Amma.”

“It is not the dwarvish way,” Amma countered at once, turning to her son. “Is it, my king?”

Thrain thumped his fist on the table. “Very true! The writings of Mahal’s prophets all say a new marriage is a false marriage, even after the death of a wife. It would be a bad example to the kingdom.”

Something had soured beneath the surface when Thrain looked at Frerin. Kili would have put it down to the King’s fits of madness, but in truth he had never heard Thrain speak with a tone of such sobriety. The sane-madness continued that week when both Fili and Kili were reinstated into the military. Fili was merely at a deputy lieutenant – a rank three years below what he should have been due before his removal – and Kili had to redo the final year of his scouts’ training, but neither of them spoke a work of complaint. They swore their oaths to their king and their mountain like every other soldier. 

They discussed it in bed, trying to pick apart who had swayed whom, what Frerin had really done, whether Thorin knew what Amma knew, whether the king’s son or mother had spoken on behalf of Fili and Kili while Thrain was muddled with the tragedy. But they couldn’t be sure of anything. Fili was filled with suspician, sure his triumphant return to service would be taken away from him as soon as Thrain forgot about Frerin. It was all Kili could do to distract him. 

But he did his best, and he knew what Fili wanted so well these days. Bare skin and fingers and tongues, and the heat inside a body, Fili was easier to please than Ori. And rougher, and faster, and more in every way. It was hard not to be intoxicated. But it was exhausting, and sometimes it felt like a trial – like Fili was testing him. If Kili didn’t come, or if he came too soon and not in sync, Fili would be disappointed, or thuggish, or he would say such crude things. He brought Kili so high, but the path he balanced on grew thinner and thinner.

Often it was a relief to get away to Ori, even if his spare days were rarer now. Ori took time and patience and careful work, both of them fumbling against each other in the tiny bedroom above his brother’s restaurant, laughing and shushing each other if it went wrong or if Dori walked past the door. 

 

08.

They were not cadets anymore. They were out there on patrol four or five times a month, sometimes outside of the mountain for a week or longer. Fili kept watch over the great doors and waited for any hint of danger or warnings calling for aid. Kili’s scouts watched the borders and the roads, accompanying the caravans and travellers when necessary – not just Erebor’s people, but any traders that passed through their territory. Men and Elves too, bringing wares or looking for craft or just seeking safe passage. 

Thrain did not like elves – the Greenwood folk had not come to their aid when Smaug decimated their kin, nor sent more than a token party of healers, saying they could not aid in the rebuilding while their own borders were assailed by the creeping plague that had turned their forest into Mirkwood. But there were still raids by orcs even over Erebor’s borders, and neither Fili nor his superiors wanted blood to be shed on their land if they could prevent it. Thorin soothed the king by portraying the dwarvish chaperones as a show of strength and pride. No elves could accuse them of cowardice or poverty that way, and Thrain was mollified. 

And so Kili often found himself riding beside a marching party of slender warriors from Thranduil’s halls, trading insults and food with their captains, or leading families from Dale through the safe paths east, watching them carry their sons on their shoulders and sing together when the journey grew dull. He liked new people. New people were not cunning, nor disingenuous, nor did they know him well enough to guess his thoughts no matter how he tried to hide them. New people were merely curious and proud and entrenched in their own needs and habits. The mountain was always waiting on the horizon like Thrain on his throne above the great hall, but there were days Kili looked back at it and thought how easy it would be to ride away and never return.

It was not a holiday, however. There were fracases with orcs and human bandits, there were days Kili sent fast riders or ravens back to summon Fili’s troops because they had come across a burned farmhouse or the remains of an unwelcome campsite. He killed his first orc on his third patrol, a small creature with a starved face that cried as its guts came out, but after the fourth the killings did not keep him awake.

Once, the scouts were bringing a caravan of jewels and fine machinery out of Erebor’s best workshops when they were ambushed without warning in the middle of a grey-clouded day. They had never seen orcs attack under the light, and certainly not one of the major caravans, which were always well-guarded. Two of the scouts were dead before Kili could rally them to encircle the civilians. There was no time; they managed to drive the orcs away for scant space to breathe and then he bellowed for a retreat, for the traders to leave the wagons and run for their lives. The scouts backed them on foot firing arrows over their shoulders. But the traders wouldn’t leave their livelihoods. Two of them urged their ponies off with the wagons still attached, while others grabbed as many chests and bags as they could carry. The orcs followed, screaming their raiding-cries and slinging their threats in westron.

They were pursued into a narrow part of the road where the scouts managed to get into formation, half at the front with swords and half raised up on the rocks and wagons with bows. Kili knew they could hold their ground long enough to stem the blood flowing free from wounds and send off the raven that had been riding with them. They could hold their ground until nightfall. After that, blind where the orcs keen eyes were not, they would never survive to see moonrise.

Fili’s troops came just as a red glow began to spread across the sky. The orcs had not been warned that Erebor could react so quickly, and it was a bloodbath. But cornered and lost, the creatures fought harder than ever, trying to break through the Kili’s ranks, the dwarves that they knew had been strained or wounded since noon. The swordsmen, Kili among them, were pushed back off the road and down the hill onto the grassy, slippery slopes. And in the midst of the struggle, Kili heard his brother’s voice.

“ _Downhill! Chase them! Protect the prince – protect the prince!_ ”

“No!” Kili screamed, sweeping an orc’s legs out from under him and pointing with his sword. “It’s a ruse – the archers, the archers!”

He could see the orcs already pulling back. With the scouts divided, they surged now up the hill, over the rocks to where Kili’s few bowmen had been trying to help from a distance. At such short range they had no chance. A third of the orcs escaped that way, cutting down three more scouts and one of the traders.

They could not get back to Erebor that night. It would be a slow and agonising journey home with the wounded on stretchers or limping along, and the bodies wrapped and laid out in the two surviving caravans. They camped on an open riverbank with watchmen at eight points of the compass, bandaged their fellow soldiers and brought them water. They gave the dying prayers and witnessed their last messages for parents and brothers.

Kili found his own brother hunched by one of the watchfires, taking his turn with the rest of his men. He sat beside him and took his hand, gripping it when Fili did not look at him.

“You made a mistake,” he said hoarsely. “You must learn from it.”

“I can’t,” Fili snarled, his gaze staring into the darkness. There were deep shadows under his eyes and his fingers held Kili’s so tight it hurt. “I can’t help putting you first.”

Kili was silent for a moment. He saw that there was a smear of orc-blood on Fili’s cheek. He licked his thumb and cleaned it away, wiping his hand on the grass. Fili turned his face towards him, his lips parting, but they were in sight of the camp, and as the captain Fili was looked to always for orders. They touched their foreheads together, close enough to share breath. 

“I will never be king,” Kili said quietly. “My life is worth no more than any other soldier’s.”

Fili bared his teeth. “It is to me,” he shook his head. “If it was the only way to protect you, I could order you to leave the scouts. Make you go back and be a court nobleman, drink wine every night, fuck your little bastard librarian.”

Kili drew back. He rarely spoke of Ori in his family’s presence, not even when alone with his brother, and when he did he made sure to use a careless tone with which he might discuss a spare pony. He knew his uncles and grandmother had spies everywhere. Since he was a school boy he had learned to take winding routes and watch for followers wherever he went, even around the palace, and to look for passers-by who seemed to keep their eyes averted until they thought he was not paying attention. But he had never expected Fili to keep tabs on him. He had never even considered it. 

He stared at Fili’s narrowed eyes, his heaving breath. He did not let go of his hand. At last he said, “Don’t ever speak of him like that. Not ever.”

“I don’t have to be kind to commoners,” Fili snapped.

“Do not call him a bastard again.” Kili answered. “I will not forgive you twice.”

 

09.

He hated spending time in the palace. He felt more on guard in the throne room than he ever felt when he was on patrol. But even escaping to Ori’s house was not always a sanctuary. It was clear – increasingly so, and yet Kili increasingly denied it – that Dori did not like him. Kili and Ori had never spoken to Dori of how they behaved when Dori was downstairs running the restaurant, but he had guessed. He had seen Kili’s hand lingering too long on his brother’s arm, seen the ease with which they spoke and how close they sat, how carelessly they leaned into one another. 

It was not as if it was a punishable offense. In fact, it was well known that warriors – away at war for months or years – sometimes fell in love with each other, shared all decisions, shared beds, died for each other as readily as a dam would die for her child. And everyone knew about this dwarf or that dwarf who had shacked up with a friend, especially among the Good Brothers – those who had sworn off marriage to financially support the family of a married sibling, since at least half the men of their race would never take a wife. Love happened. Sex happened. Oafish jokes were made in pubs (and in restaurants too), and sometimes it came to blows when affection soured or was not returned, but it happened.

But Dori did not want it for his brother. Or maybe he just did not like Kili; the prince, the lad who gave money away like it was water, the one who – in the end, despite all his claims to the contrary – could speak a work and dole out ruin or death to them. 

Kili was staying for dinner one night when Dori finally spoke up. He said he’d never deny that Kili had been a good friend and a welcome companion for Ori, especially now that he couldn’t work outside the house, but anything more must stop. For Ori’s sake, Dori said.

Kili felt a temper rising in him for the first time in years. He held it down. “Ori can make that decision for himself.”

Ori was staring at his food, a frown growing between his eyes. Dori twisted his head to look at Kili. “It’s not about what’s good for him in this life,” Dori said, suddenly earnest, his hands flat on the table. “There are several prophets who write that – that such things must remain within marriage. These are the teachings of Mahal, and to go against him – there may be punishments beyond death!”

“Well it’s a bit late, isn’t it?” Kili shrugged, waving his fork. “We’re tarnished now, we might as well enjoy ourselves in this life.”

“You’re mocking our creator,” Dori spluttered. 

“No, I just don’t believe prophets,” Kili gestured towards Ori. “Think of it this way, Dori. We know Mahal made the seven fathers first and then the seven mothers many ages later, when they were due to wake from the stone. So what else were the seven fathers supposed to do for all those thousands of years?”

Ori laughed.

Dori threw Kili out of the house. 

He could only come back when he could sneak in after that. He would have to wait until he was sure Dori was busy in the restaurant or out running errands. There was no key under the shrine any more. Kili threw stones at Ori’s window until Ori let him in, or until there were no more stones lying around the back door of the house. He could leave via Ori’s window, which was within jumping reach of the brickwall that flanked the neighbouring shops. Once, Ori had another fit while Kili was with him, and Kili sat panicking with Ori’s head on his lap, wondering whether to call Dori or not. Ori come out of it before he had decided. 

He was caught by Dori several times, of course, and Ori reported that his brother was well aware Kili was still visiting. He evidently feared the retribution of a prince more than he feared for Ori’s reputation with the creator. Kili refused to visit openly, however, until Dori would give him permission to do so, and Dori never did.

In the midst of it all, Oin came to Kili with a new treatment for the Falling Sickness that he had heard about from the elves. Many elves suffered the illness too, Oin said. None of their magic had ever been found to work, yet you never saw the sickness in them. They claimed it could be repressed if the patient was near-starved of anything but grease – living on milk and cream, pure oils, lard and dripping, with only a few varied fruits and leaves to cleanse their blood – then the fits would reduce or even disappear. Those that had committed entirely to these strange habits, strictly denying themselves all food from the grains or roots of plants or the flesh of animals, had shown undeniable improvements. 

Ori covered his face when Kili excitedly related Oin’s report. He groaned, “That’s the maddest thing I’ve ever heard, Kili. Elves are elves – they might stand on their heads and try and touch the moon with their feet and they’d probably think it helped.”

“It’s worth trying, though, isn’t it?” Kili clutched Ori’s hand between both of his own. “If turning upside-down and standing on the moon might work, wouldn’t it be worth trying?”

“But I can’t afford any of those things!” Ori huffed. “Oils and cream and fruit – you must be joking!”

“I’ll pay for everything.”

“What about beer? Beer comes from grain. Do I have to give that up?” Ori scowled.

“I’m sure drinks don't count,” Kili nodded.

“No, it’s ridiculous, I’ll starve to death.”

“Please, Ori,” Kili begged. “Imagine if you were cured. You wouldn’t be stuck in this house any more, Dori wouldn’t need to look after you. You could go back to work, or do anything else you liked – I’ll buy you a new house, give you anything you want, and you could write books and do your drawings all day and have all the visitors you wanted!”

Ori grizzled and whined and finally, sighing, said he would do his best. Kili arranged as many of the foods that Oin had suggested to be sent to Ori’s house every day. 

Two weeks later, Ori had another full and terrible fit. Kili only heard about it when he came to the house later and spoke to one of Dori’s regular customers. Ori had fallen on the stairs and hit his head so badly that as he lay unseen above, his body seizing, they said the blood dripped down over the side of the tread and into the beard of a man paying for his dinner – that was how Dori realised what was happening and ran up to find him. 

Dori let Kili in to see Ori as soon as the restaurant closed. His friend was sitting in his mother’s old chair wrapped in the blanket. His head was bandaged thickly. His skin was very pale and his gaze sluggish. His hand crept out and took hold of Kili’s wrist when Kili sat down beside him.

“I’m still eating your wretched elf-food,” he murmured, in a voice thinner then the finest sheets of notepaper. Kili smiled until he saw that tears had come into Ori’s eyes. “I can’t go on, Kili. I want to be better.”

Kili crouched beside him and laid his head on Ori’s arm, entwining their fingers, and pretended he was not crying too.

He went to Fili that night and lost himself there. Fili did not seem to know that anything was wrong. Fili did not think that there could be people in the world who were not part of the royal family, after all, who could have hopes and griefs the same as they did. Kili did not leave his bed that night afterwards, but lay tangled in Fili, wishing they could fuse together into one soul in two bodies so that his life would depend on Fili and Fili alone, and no one else would matter. Everything would be so much easier that way. Live for his brother, die for his brother, and as Fili would say, fuck anyone else who got in the way.

That night he dreamed of Mama’s execution for the first time in decades.

 

010.

That winter there was no sign of enemies in their borders, not one, not once.

Frerin must have got bored. He took a squadron of soldiers – men he got drunk with, visited the Dale brothels with, men that Amma would have said were a bad influence and she would have had it the wrong way around. In their full regalia, not drunk, nor mad, they went in daylight and attacked a large homestead some miles north of the Lonely Mountain, and killed nine men and three women, and a child of four years old. The cattle they killed or scattered, the houses they burned.

Why? No one could answer. Why did Frerin do anything? It was clear he thought that no one could blame him directly, when they had left no survivors. But everyone had seen them go out that day, and everyone had seen them come back smeared with sweat and soot, and humans talk more than magpies. The countryside was alight with news of the terrible crime – it took no more than a day before everyone connected it up.

The king could not ignore such senseless brutality. Frerin’s four ringleaders were executed and the rest of the men whipped and barred from all future service. Frerin himself was demoted down to a lieutenant and given leave for a month. 

Fili took his place as commander of the outer city guard. He was now second in the ranks only to the king’s seven generals. 

 

011.

Ori was much improved for all of that summer and through the autumn, though Kili was not there to appreciate it. The roads were busy beyond living memory and Kili spent almost all his days on patrol. He got rare letters from Ori, but they grew shorter as the days began to wane again, and there was a distance in the tone that Kili had never sensed before. 

On Durin’s day he had three days free in Erebor, and went to visit Ori on the morning of the first.

“He’s not here,” Dori said. He was busy in the kitchen, and but that did not quite explain why he avoided Kili’s eye.

“Where is he?”

“At the temple on Fourth,” replied Dori.

Kili had not seen Ori leave the house alone for more than a year. He almost skipped through the muck-filled streets of cheapside and over the bridge until he reached the Fourth Quarter of the centre city. The temple of Mahal there was high-roofed with thick arches but plainly decorated, as all the cult’s places of worship were. It was quiet inside and smelled of incense. A monk bowed to him as he stepped through the second threshold. His head and beard were shaved, and though Kili had seen the parades from a distance, it looked so strange to him – like a huge child with too-small eyes – that Kili tensed in fright and could only stare. The monk slipped away without a word.

Kili found Ori sitting on a bench at the back of the worship hall, reading a book of religious lessons. Ori jumped when Kili’s hand landed on his shoulder and laughed when he realised who it was.

“You damned scout,” he complained, as he’d said before; it had become a joke between them. “I think my heart stopped for a moment!”

Kili grinned at him and pulled him up and into a tight embrace. He felt thin, but as they separated he saw there was colour in Ori’s cheeks and life in his eyes. 

“It’s good to see you out,” Kili clapped him on the back. 

“It’s good to be out,” Ori smiled. His hand crept up Kili’s neck to cup his jaw. He said quietly, “I missed you.”

“Did you? The time flew by for me,” Kili sniggered. “Come on, let’s go find a tavern, eh? Drinks on me.”

“No, I… I can’t,” Ori clutched the book to his chest. “I have a meeting with the head priest very soon.”

Kili frowned. “Whatever for?”

Ori was staring down at his feet. His fingertips curled around the corner of his book. “I haven’t had one of my… my episodes… since last year, Kili. It’s a miracle.”

Kili wanted to laugh, but his chest was clenched too tight to release any air. He couldn’t even speak for a moment. He clutched Ori’s arms and finally croaked, “Then it worked! The elf-food worked!”

Ori shook his head. A dark shadow like that of a hawk seemed to pass over Kili’s joy. There was more; there was something huge hiding just out of sight. Ori cleared his throat and picked at his book and at last spoke. “No, Kili. Or at least, only because it was meant to work. Dori started visiting the temple three times a week, to pray for me. He spoke to the priests. He started bringing me here. Mahal has cured me, Kili. And I… I think it was for a reason,” he raised his head. Kili could see a fading, pink scar where he had hit his crown in the fall on the stairs. “I think he wants me to become a monk. I saw it when I had the last fit – I saw visions. I didn’t understand them then, but I told the priests, and they explained it all to me. Mahal has a plan for me, Kili.”

Silence surrounded them. Kili could only stare. After the seconds had stretched into agony, Ori continued, “There’s a monastry outside the mountain, above Dale. They will take me on as a novice. They often fast as part of the training. I can continue with the – the elf food – if it’s what Mahal wishes. It all works out like it was meant to be. Do you… do you see, Kili? I can’t turn away from this. It feels right. And – and Dori was right too. I’ll be celibate, as Monks should be. And I don’t… if I see you, I don’t think I could stay away from you, and that scares me, Kili— do you see?”

Kili swayed where he stood. He shook his head. He said something, afterwards he never remembered what, something dismissive. As if Ori was nothing more than a servant who had fulfilled his duty and was now free to leave. 

He walked out and did not remember how he got back to the palace.

 

012.

He spent two days in his rooms, and then had to return to patrols. He went through the motions as if his body was a puppet animated by his mind from some distance off. It was an uneventful circuit. He spoke and laughed with his fellow scouts, but without feeling it, never sure if he was really fooling them. When they next returned to the barracks in the mouth of Erebor, Fili was changing over the squadrons. He found Kili in the armoury, sitting on the edge of an empty sword-rack with his head propped up on his hand.

“There you are, I’ve been looking everywhere,” Fili laughed, and then a moment later, “What’s wrong?”

When Kili didn’t immediately answer, he closed and barred the door and came to kneel beside him. “Kili? What is it?”

Kili told him everything. It spilled out of him, it became a torrent, it filled the world. Fili held him tight, stroking his hair, lips pressed to Kili’s ear as he sobbed and gasped for breath.

“I c-c-ould have h-him arrested,” Kili snarled, his voice rising. “I could have h-him executed tom-m-morrow, I could! Him and his bastard b-b-brother, b-burn their house to a-ashes! I’m Thrain’s g-g-grandson, I can d-do as I wish – he can’t – he can’t d-d-do this to me,” his words fell apart in his mouth and became disconnected sounds.

Fili waited until his weeping finally became only a soft whimper. He rocked gently with his brother in his arms. 

“Give it time,” he said softly. “This will pass. If you hurt him, you will regret it.”

Kili choked and pressed his face into Fili’s shoulder. 

“You see, brother?” Fili soothed. “We can’t trust anyone but each other.”


	3. Trinity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slow update - very busy week combined with some major changes to this chapter from the original draft. Thank you all for the support and lovely comments! 
> 
> EDIT: I also wanted to add for the Kili/Ori folks that Ori is not gone for good, because I know I would have been concerned if he'd been missing this long.

1.

There was a magnificent party on the King’s birthday that year. At three hours past midnight, Kili was drunk but not quite enough to stumble as he made his way back to his rooms. 

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye. A good scout should have reacted better to the attack, but he was in the palace, with guards everywhere and the music echoing through the halls around him. He glimpsed the dwarf, earth-brown braids and blue eyes, but his face was smashed against the wall and his sword-arm twisted agonisingly high before he recognised the image.

“Frerin!” he croaked. “What – it’s me –”

“Shut up,” and suddenly there was a cold, steel point digging in deep beside the tendon of his neck. Kili sucked in a breath. “Scream and the next sound you make will be a gurgle, nephew.”

Kili pressed his lips together. The wine was making his head spin. A part of him almost laughed. This was one of Frerin’s jokes. It was so like him. But he was still heavier than Kili and much more experienced at fighting; Kili was trying to push back against him and Frerin was like a wall of stone. And if it wasn’t a joke – that was even funnier, really. It was so like Frerin, who was a master swordsman in the sparring ring and used those skills to kill children and farmers, so typical of him to attack a drunk dwarf.

“It’s not right,” Frerin hissed in his ear. His breath smelled of the heady spirits that the Iron Hills distilled in huge vats, a golden liquor that burned when it went down. “You’re a dead end to the family, little nephew. You and that yellow-haired _hazug_. I’m so much better, I’m better, I’m supposed to carry the line on—”

Kili gritted his teeth. His arm was burning with the stretch of tendons. The most important thing in the world, he felt, was not to stutter. “If you stick that blade in me the king will know it was you, Frerin. It won’t be just a demotion and a holiday this time.”

“He’ll love me!” Frerin gave a low cry of elation. “That whore’s blood finally eradicated from his family—” for a moment Kili forgot the knife and jerked under his hands, but Frerin was stronger, and laughed in his ear. “Don’t you know? She opened her legs for _anyone_. You really think you’re her husband’s son? You’re a bastard mistake. But that’s not why I’m going to kill you, oh no, nephew. I’m gonna to slit your throat and watch you crawl away and die at his feet, just so I can see his face, that moment when he realises his precious baby brother is dead. And then, well, he’ll lose his cool and it’ll be self-defense when I gut him, won’t it—”

There was a roar behind them, and the pressures on Kili’s arm and throat were suddenly gone. He spun in time to see Fili hurl Frerin down on the ground, kicking the knife from his hand and leaping on top of him, pummelling him with his fists over and over. Kili tried to pull him off, and Fili elbowed him so hard he doubled up, gasping, and Fili didn’t even notice.

There were already guards on their way. Six of them pulled Fili off his uncle, and three held Frerin back when he went for the knife again. There was a lot shouting, and one of the guards trying to call for calm and not getting any, and then Amma and one of her maids had arrived on top of anything.

“Oh, my poor darling!” she shrieked, taking hold of Frerin’s mashed face. She snarled at Fili. “What did you do? What were you _thinking_?”

“He’s drunk and out of his mind, Amma!” Fili yelled, jabbing his finger at Kili. “He had a knife to Kili’s throat!”

“Oh, Fili, you overreact to everything,” Amma snapped. “You spiteful boy.”

Kili shook his brother off when Fili fussed over him. “I’m fine,” he rubbed his neck, still feeling the focused bruise where the point of knife had burrowed in, not quite enough to draw blood. The comment about Kili’s father stung sharper, but Kili doubted the truth of it – if Frerin had really believed something like that, he’d have been using it against Kili long before now. “I’m fine, Fili. He was drunk.”

“We must tell Thorin!” 

“No, Fili, just leave it,” Kili told him, pulling him away.

They went to Fili’s room, and Fili sat in a quiet rage, refusing to look at his brother. Finally Kili knelt beside him, gripping his hand. “Why are you angry at _me_? You know Thorin wouldn’t do anything! He’d probably punish you for starting a fight!”

“You don’t care about me,” Fili croaked, trying to pull his hand away, but Kili held it tight. “You don’t care about how I’d feel if he had – if you weren’t here. You’re so selfish, Kili, you’d rather stay in Thorin’s good books and let Frerin push you around than make a fuss.”

“That’s not it at all,” Kili groaned. “I’m just trying to keep the peace.”

“You’d choose peace with the family over me!”

Kili sucked in a long breath. Silence fell between them. Kili was still drunk, just a little bit, but his mind felt clear. He tugged Fili’s hand closer and pressed his forehead to the bruised and split knuckles that had smashed against his uncle’s face. 

“I rescind all vows to my grandfather who is King, and to any mountain ruled by him,” he said. “I renounce these vows in the sight of Mahal, knowing there is nothing more cursed to him than an oath-breaker. I swear my loyalty and my life to you, brother. I will go where you lead. I will fight by your side. I will die for you, and you alone. You are my captain for all time, and I will have no other.”

Fili was breathing fast as Kili raised his head. He said nothing, but pulled Kili to his chest and kissed his brow and embraced him, shaking as he gasped for air. 

 

2.

Death came to Erebor in the year of Kili’s seventy-fifth birthday, and it changed everything.

It started in the merchant’s district. Always packed and colourful, fulls of thieves and fights and strange characters. It was the only place you might see elves under the mountain where no one one looked twice at them. And they were there, that week – a handful of young wood elves who’d come in with a party of Lake Town men to enjoy the famed markets and eateries that edged the trade district. It was bad luck that they’d chosen that week. But it was their own fault that they got into an argument over the cost of board with the keeper of a popular inn. Six hours later half the guests were fallen and groaning in their beds, voiding their bowels without respite.

Elf magic, the rumours said. The elves had taken revenge (a terrible revenge, as it turned out, far more terrible than even the most foul and cruel orc could have devised). But in the beginning it was just four guests and an innkeeper. And then five more guests and the innkeeper’s sons. And then two of the guests were dead and there was danger of rioting. 

Kili and twenty scouts happened to be on the far side of the city, so they were the first who came running to keep the peace. There was more confusion than murder, luckily. The scouts cooled things down and took in six unruly dwarves who’d smashed a few windows. Fili’s troops were brought in from their front guard to escort the elves straight out into the sunshine as quickly possible. They were glad to go, and Kili heard later that they actually thanked Fili deeply and swore him their debt, while making a few snide comment about the natural barbarism of the common _naugrim_ while they were at it. 

Kili wasn’t there for that sweet moment of friendship. He was helping clean up the damage the crowd had done to the shop-fronts and fruit-stalls. There was an air of mirth hanging over the trade district now that folk had calmed down a bit. It had been a fun distraction for everyone except those poor fellows who had had their facades smashed or soiled. 

Nobody knew how bad things were about to get.

“Thank you muchly, dear,” an old dam said as Kili nailed boards over the shattered remains of her lead-lined window. “It’s so good to know there’s young folks like you looking out for us. You’re one of the Southsnout clan, aren’t you? Your da used to hoist barrels just down the road, I recognise you. Did you work up a sweat? I’ll bring you something, my dear.”

She was such a sweet, doddering thing, quite unlike Amma with her rigid shoulders and sharp tongue. She brought him a jug of water with a few drops of lemon juice in it, which was very kind of her, because lemons cost more than their weight in copper these days. Kili finished nailing the boards in, and thanked her, and went on his way.

One the second day, there were twenty-six new cases in nine houses and the mirth had evaporated. Quarintine was declared, the infected houses marked and the occupants ordered to stay inside on pain of arrest and forced detention. Some of the eastern dwarves recognised the spreading plague – they called it the Belly Sickness, and it was endemic around Rhûn, broke out in bursts every few years and occasionally was seen in the Iron Hills. But it had never been known under the Lonely Mountain. At once the palace sent a dozen ravens to Dain, asking for advice on how to treat or at least contain the sickness. 

(It must have come in with traders from the east, Harma told Kili later, but still everybody said it was elves). 

On the third day, Kili woke in the barracks feeling a little feverish. His hair was sticking to his temples. Fili’s squads had taken charge of the quarantine and were keeping the populace calm, and he came to say goodbye for the morning just as Kili’s knees gave out and he fell, clutching his stomach.

They took him to the palace and set him up in closed rooms there. It all happened very fast. He remembered that Amma was beside herself with worry, and that Fili kept apologising because he had to go, his men were waiting, and Kili promised, “I’m quite well, I’ll shake it off by tonight, you go.”

By that evening he could not even stand. The only movement left was the clench of his body around his agonising bowels, his back arching and his hands balling around the sheets. The stench of his own filth was everywhere. Black spots filled his vision. The world spun as he swam in and out of consciousness. He had to be lifted upright every time the sickness wrung him out anew. The servants’ hands were rough and quick. They were afraid to touch him.

The city was dying too. The sickness spread to Cheapside, then to the Artisans’ neighbourhoods, then even into the homes of the lower nobles. People said you could be spared if you wore a clove around your neck, people said you got it by breathing the breath of the dying, people said all sorts of desperate things but the death crept on like a miasma through the streets. Dwarves were falling ill and dying faster than the quarintine could paint marks on their doors, faster than the bodies could be carried away. 

The cult of Mahal opened their doors and welcomed in the fearful and the sick alike, seperating the ill to be nursed by monks. None of the monks and priests had fallen to the disease yet – not one – and it became clear that those who sought sanctuary in the temples were collapsing far less often. Those the monks nursed and fed were saved at a greater rate than those that were left abandoned in their homes. With Mahal was sanctuary and life.

Even Thrain had begun to pray.

 

3\. 

A night passed. Kili could no longer lift his hand or turn his head. His skin was flaccid and wrinkled, his eyes sunk into deep pits and his throat burned with a dry fire like caustic chalk. His hearing came and went. He could not measure the passing of time. He hallucinated that Mama was in the doorway, telling him he was not welcome, he must not chase her. The room shrunk and grew around him in time with his heartbeat. He thought a monk, bald and with a clean-shaved chin, was standing over him, praying in khuzdul, and he was sure his soul was being claimed until he recognised Ori.

He couldn’t speak. Ori made signs over bowls and forced the bowls to his mouth, making him drink what seemed to be buckets of a salty-sweet broth. He choked at least once. He wasn’t sure what was real; he didn’t even have the presence of mind to ask the question of reality. 

At some point he awoke and found his hearing restored and his headache abated a little. He could hear Fili’s voice, speaking softly from somewhere in the room. Fili’s armour clinked. He must have come straight off from duty – or was about to go on. 

“…he live?” Fili was asking.

After a moment, Ori’s voice replied, “It was late to start, your majesty. We’re taught to make them drink as soon as the first signs show. But it’s usually children who get sick like this. I don’t know – I mean, this is a new sickness, even if it has the same remedy.”

“He can’t go,” Fili said hoarsely. “He mustn’t. I need him.”

“I know,” Ori said.

“You don’t. He’s unique. He’s the only person in the world who can love unconditionally, purely.”

There was a long silence and then Ori said, a little sadly, “You don’t really think that’s true, do you, Fili?”

 

4\. 

At some point Kili found his could lift his head and speak a few words in a rasp, but doing so was exhausting. He was content to lie, peering through the cracks of his eyelids, and look at Ori as if watching the scene from far above it. Ori, in his monk’s robe and with exhausted shadows under his eyes, made him drink and get up to void, cleaned him and piled blankets on him. A part of Kili thought this was still a dream, or a death-vision. He was not grudging. It was a good vision. A part of him was afraid to get better. Suppose Ori wasn’t really here? Suppose he disappeared as Kili’s fever abated?

Fili came and went, looking even more tired and dusty than Ori. At one point he was sitting by the bed, holding Fili’s hand as Ori waited in the corner with his head bowed, when the door opened without knocking. A dam stood there in a thick, woolen traveller’s dress. She had golden hair, and was too young for a beard yet, though her sideburns had grown down past her ears. Kili didn’t recognise her.

“Are you the one from the Dale Monastary?” she barked at Ori, who looked at Fili in confusion.

“Yes, I am,” Ori said after a moment.

“Do they listen to you, in Dale?” the dam said. “Do your priests hold sway over the men, there?”

Ori shook his head, frowning. “They have different gods, my lady.”

“You must make them listen; I will tell you what to say,” she told him.

“Excuse me,” Fili stood up. “Don’t come in here making a ruckas, my brother is sick.”

The dam looked at him. “Are you the king’s son?”

“His grandson,” Fili snapped. “And you?”

“We’re from the Iron Hills. My master is Dain’s best healer. You are in charge of the army, yes? Tell them to lift the quarantine. You’re killing your own people for nothing. Go to the meeting hall behind the throne room and they’ll tell you what to do. Now come with me,” she reached out and grabbed Ori’s arm, tugging him towards the door. “You must come with me if you want to save all the lives in Dale.”

Fili made a noise of protest as Ori was dragged out, and then he checked Kili’s temperature and stormed out himself, his swords swinging from his belt.

 

5.

The cult of Mahal was given full charge of caring for the infected, with a dozen soldiers at each temple to assist them. With their help, the plague was slowly contained, one section of the city at a time. Thrain said the sickness was a curse, a curse by evil spirits, because Erebor had forgotten their roots and their creator. They had allowed widows to remarry and let foreigners run businesses. By the end of the second week Thrain declared the cult of Mahal the only religion under the Lonely Mountain. No more household gods, no more ancestor-worship. The shrines to the maiar and to Nienna and even to Durin the Deathless were to be bricked up or transformed into the plain alters to Mahal – any who refused to do this would be heavily fined, or worse. The king ordered that the whole city be stopped in daily prayer until the sickness began to abate. 

The dam with the golden hair was named Harma. She was the scribe in a party of twenty healers and administrators who had seen the Belly Sickness in the Iron Hills (but they called it the Wet Sickness these days, because there were many belly sicknesses that were not so deadly). She told Kili everything – or told his brother everything, as Kili sat up in bed recovering by slow degrees. The sickness was in the water, she said. The reservoir that fed the people and animals of the trade district must have been poisoned first, probably by some caravan coming out of Rhûn with shipments of salt and ore. By the time Dain’s healer had arrived, however, the main aquaduct was spreading it across the city. That was why they had to move so fast to warn Dale – the aquaduct fed into the river, from which Dale took its water. 

They had tried to warn Laketown too, but Laketown was not so close in friendship to the dwarves as Dale. They didn’t listen; and besides, they lived on the plains where there were no clean springs and creeks to supply them, where the river-water fed even the wells on solid land. And so Laketown had fallen to the sickness where Dale had not, and scores had died already, and Thranduil had sent forty elves to help them through the disaster. Elves did not get the sickness, for whatever reason – they almost certainly could not carry it either, Harma said.

(But still people blamed the elves, even years later.)

All this Kili learned as he lay in his bed and clawed back his strength. Fili sat beside him whenever his duties for the day were finished, and Harma spoke to Fili. Kili learned that fourteen of his scouts had been claimed by the sickness. By the time a month had passed he would learn that in total, one in fourteen dwarves of Erebor was thought to have died – mostly children or white-haired, wrinkled old dwarves, but many of their strongest and finest as well. 

“But the temples were spared,” Kili croaked from his bed. Harma looked up, seeming to have forgotten that he was there – her attention had been entirely on Fili. “Did Mahal spare the temples?”

“Their wells were spared,” Harma cut him off. “They dig them very deep, because they believe it puts their holy water closer to Mahal. Everyone else in the city gets the water from the aquaducts. And the priests are used to helping the poor. They know how to save lives for cheap.” 

Later, Kili asked Fili if Ori had really been there, or if he had dreamed him.

“Yes,” Fili said. “I called him to come from the monastry. I couldn’t trust anyone else to look after you.”

But he had gone back now, without leaving a word behind. 

 

6.

Fili talked about Harma a lot. A _lot_. Kili had to hear about her constantly as he recovered. Her father had been from old Erebor nobility (though he’d fallen to sheep farming by the time of her birth); her mother was a Stonefoot, like their own father. She was raised in the Iron Hills and orphaned young – the father killed in a fight with a neighbour, the mother a suicide soon after – and she’d become handmaiden to Dain’s daughters. When the daughters married and left Dain’s home, he offered to find Harma a husband, but she preferred to work. He gave her a position as a scribe and a clerk in his ministry, and when Dain’s personal physician took charge of improving the health of the Iron Hills she became his assistant. 

“Can we talk about something else?” Kili grumbled.

“What do you mean?” Fili looked up.

Kili rolled his eyes. “You haven’t shut up about that dam since I awoke. Seduce her and be done with it; she’s going back to the Iron Hills anyway so you needn’t worry about the consequences. And don’t tell me all the details afterwards, either!”

Fili went red and chuckled. “Are you jealous, brother?”

“I’m sick and you’re not helping me,” Kili whined. 

Soon he was well enough to walk about the palace alone. Amma hugged him and kissed him and praised Mahal for his survival (but she had not, Kili thought, come to see him when he’d been too weak to move and soiling his bedclothes twice an hour). He wanted to go back to the scouts, but Thorin would not let him, saying he would only slow them down. Fili had taken charge of his soldiers and delegated new leaders until he was better. Kili was left to suffocate in the palace’s pampered routines and the constant attention of servants, bored and worried about whether the patrols were protecting Erebor properly, trying to avoid Frerin and his grandfather. 

At last, Fili promised he’d smuggle him out to rejoin the scouts if Thorin didn’t let him leave soon. They were sitting up in Fili’s bed, clothes half discarded, Fili’s hand resting on his knee. “Though I have missed having you here whenever I want, you know,” Fili said, leaning in to press kisses along his collarbone. 

Kili didn’t feel responsive to Fili’s calloused hands on his skin. He couldn’t relax, after so long in the palace. His limbs felt flabby and weak without a chance to run on open roads. He was still mired in the memories of his sickness and haunted by thoughts of Erebor dying, dying as he had nearly died, in agony and despair. He wanted to be outside in the wind. He let Fili go on for a while, but Fili didn’t seem to notice his lack of interest. He pushed Kili down against the pillows, and asked if Kili would wait while he found some oil. He was so hungry that Kili let him lift his knees up and take what he wanted, their foreheads pressed together, but something was different, and Kili felt the stretch far worse than he had for a long time and got nothing out of it.

Fili lay draped across him afterwards, stroking his fingers across Kili’s ribs. After a long time he said, “There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

“Anything,” Kili whispered into the hair of his temple.

Fili raised himself onto his elbow. “I’m going to ask Harma to marry me.”

Kili didn’t answer; he felt as if Fili had asked him about some new design for the outer guard’s armour. Why was he being bothered with this? It was nothing to do with him. And then his chest tightened. Where had this come from? He’d thought Fili was like him, despite his new infatuation – that dams inspired nothing in him, except a sense of duty to carry on the line.

“I’ve never wanted someone like her, Kili,” Fili whispered, his face alight. “I feel safe with her. I want her to have my children, to bear the future kings of Erebor. It feels right. An outsider, not a pretty daughter that Amma chose, not a trinket from some family Grandfather is trying to ally with. Her children will be better kings than our family has given this mountain.”

Kili shook his head. “It’s not my place to stop you,” he said, as if he didn’t care.

“But will you forgive me?”

“You know I already do,” Kili touched his face, and there was such joy in Fili’s smile. But Kili wondered – hating himself for it – as he got up and washed himself and went back to his own bed, if Fili had been thinking about Harma tonight.

 

7.

While the Iron Hills contingent were still guests, dinners had become large, nightly events with court nobles, Dain’s people, and usually a few priests of Mahal as well. Fili chose a night when everyone was in good spirits, and waited until after the meat was devoured and everyone’s tankards were being refilled. From across the table, Kili watched him take deep breaths and steel himself. He stood up and turned towards his grandfather.

“My king,” he said, and hopefully only Kili heard the fear in his voice. Thrain could put a stop to everything so easily. “I have a hope in my heart for which I humbly ask your blessing.”

Thrain had not had as much wine as a newcomer might have guessed. His single eye grew hard and he sat up in his chair. “Ask it, boy. Don’t blabber on.”

Fili asked the king’s permission to take Harma as a wife. At once, the king broke in a braying guffaw. “Really, lad? Really – that ink-stained girl? That’s the bed you’ve chosen?”

Harma was sitting between Amma and Dain’s head physician. Her cheeks flushed, and her master balled his fist on the table. Fili’s jaw tightened. “She’s of noble blood, my king. And it would not matter to me if she was a boot-cleaner’s daughter from Cheapside.”

“I can find you some of those if you want to taste the difference, Nephew,” Frerin said, sitting across from Kili. 

“Leave it Frerin,” Kili hissed. “For once in your life.”

Frerin’s cold sneer turned on him like a hawk’s eye. “I thought you’d be on my side, Little Baby. You’re about to lose your only friend.”

“You seem to manage fine,” Kili spat. 

“Hush! Both of you!” Amma put her hand on Frerin’s wrist. 

Fili’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, opening his mouth to speak, but Thrain was laughing even harder and could not be interrupted. Thorin had his head bowed, pinching his nose as if to quell a growing ache between his eyes.

Amma leaned forward, her brows tight. “Fili,” she hissed. “You’re far too young to marry. Sit down and stop humiliating us.”

Thrain’s shoulders shook with quiet chuckles. He waved one hand, heavy with rings, in Fili’s direction. “No, no, you’re all too hasty to silence him. The boy’s made his choice. You have my blessing, Boy. If you still want it.”

The table was silent now. Red blotches had risen on Fili’s neck and his mouth was a hard line. But finally he turned to Harma. “My lady, I haven’t – I hope this is not a surprise for you.”

She shook her head, her hands clutched in her lap. Fili licked his lips. “Well – will you have me?”

Amma was rolling her eyes. Thorin was watching Thrain now without blinking. Kili turned away and looked at Harma. After a half second in which Fili’s knees must have gone very weak, she opened her mouth. “Well – ob-obviously yes, F-f-fili,” she stammered.

(And that stammer, in the end, enamoured Kili to her at last.)

 

8\. 

When Dain learned of the match, he sent three ravens with congratulations, because one had not been strong enough to carry the message alone. Thorin had Kili sit with him in his study while he read them. His face was as grim as ever.

“Why haven’t you ever been married, Thorin?” Kili asked. “Don’t tell me you have no time; everyone can find time for a roll every now and then. And I’m sure plenty of dams would appreciate an absent husband who barely bothered them.”

Thorin did not chide him or laugh in response to the joke. Thorin, Kili thought, has the great misfortunate of being born with an inability to recognise humour. He simply shook his head. “I loved a dam once, Kili. I cannot ever love another. It’s Mahal’s way.”

This was news to Kili. He frowned. “Were you wed, Thorin? What happened to her?”

“Never mind that. Listen to this letter,” Thorin told, and began to read.

Dain spoke of closer ties and the blessings of friendship and how two dwarves married together were stronger than the sum of two dwarves apart. It was clear that he saw this union of his house and Thror’s as long overdue. 

“But Harma’s not even his family,” Kili pointed out.

“I know,” frowned Thorin, and read on further. “Oh – he’s officially adopted her as his daughter. He says it’s to make her status more befitting a future queen of Erebor. He must have deeply feared war between our people, sooner or later.”

Kili watched his uncle stroke his beard, staring at the letter. After some time, Thorin reached across and gripped Kili’s arm. “Keep your brother in check. For me.”

Kili glanced at the letter in Thorin’s hand. “You think this sets Fili up as Dain’s ally against the king? If there was a war – you think Fili would be on the wrong side of it?”

“I think,” said Thorin heavily, “that your brother is growing into his birthright at last.”

 

9.

Fili did not just want to be married; he wanted the wedding to be Erebor’s wedding. A celebration to warm people’s hearts after the raw grief that had endured since the Wet Sickness. More than a hundred guests and their retainers were travelling from the Iron Hills. Several Stonefoot chiefs had sent word that they would come with their families to witness the union (Fili and Kili’s father had been the youngest son of their most famous Field Marshal, from their wars with the Wainriders). The rumours were that half of Dale would be pouring into the mountain to join the party, too. Fili had even wanted to send invites to Thranduil and his lords, but Thorin had talked him out of it – the sentiment was neighbourly, Thorin said, but people still feared elves as plague-bringers. It was too soon to let them walk freely in Erebor’s streets. 

It was the largest gathering in living memory, save for the Ceremony of Rest that the city had held a year after Smaug was defeated. It was close to turning from a wedding into a battle – Fili had wanted to give the entire army the day off, save for a few volunteers to watch the gates and assist the city watch. But Thrain saw this as too much control that Fili was asserting over the military (“One day, for my matrimonials, and he thinks it’s a coup!” Fili snarled to his brother). The army were not well pleased to hear their holiday had been cancelled, which magnified the argument even more until the palace was filled with shouting arguments for most of the morning of the wedding, on top of all the shouting that was already necessary to keep things organised. 

When the day came, Kili was on his feet before dawn, running errands for Amma and finalising the security. He wanted things to go smoothly, but one mess after another cropped up – there was not enough cream for the kitchens, the Stonefoots were complaining about the way their ponies were being treated, Frerin had been out drinking the night before and now refused to get dressed, and Harma kept following Kili around asking if he needed help like an irritating lapdog that wouldn’t stop yapping. 

And then to top it all off, Thrain learned that Fili had refused the Cult of Mahal’s offer to officiate the ceremony. It would instead be carried out be honoured veterans, as was Erebor tradition. The King’s rage was building to tremendous heights by the time the vows were exchanged and the knots bound around the bethrothed, and in fact he stormed out while the clapping was loudest and Thorin had to make excuses to the guests about how the king’s administrative business had called him away.

By the end of the night, Kili was exhausted. He could not look at another frosted honey-cake nor carry another drunk Dale lord off to sleep in the stables nor listen to another distant cousin lecture him on how to seduce a bride of his own. His Stonefoot relatives had been the worst to deal with, constantly complaining because Fili chose to stay and wait to inherit the Lonely Mountain while their own tribes would have welcomed him as a statesman and general on their councils. The older ones whined over and over that Fili was a perfect Stonefoot prince, golden and stocky and proud. Kili was far too Ereborian for them with his dark colours and squinty eyes – Longbeard through and through, they sniffed. Kili could only agree politely through gritted teeth. He’d never thought of him and Fili as looking so different. He could not help but be reminded of Frerin calling named him a bastard, though he had not dwelt on the word before now. 

At last he slunk away to his rooms, wanting to go to Fili and just lie down with him, skin bare and arms around him – but then of course, Fili was married now.

Fili was _married_. It struck Kili at last, like a blow. They still shared the apartment they had taken when Frerin and Sund had moved into Kili’s rooms; they had not even talked about where Kili would go now that Fili had a wife. He would have to find a spare bed somewhere – but the entire palace was filled with guests! Some of them were even being housed in the great hall on roll mattresses! There would be nowhere, nowhere to go—

And Fili was _married_. What did this mean? Who was Kili, now that his brother was paired, soul to soul, in the eyes of Mahal? Was he a widower? A Good Brother? An orphan at last?

He was too tired to think about it. His bed was right next door to Fili’s – it would never do to sleep so close to the newlyweds. He went into the reading room at the end of Fili’s quarters, as far away from the bedrooms as possible. It was a chilly bower built out from the cliffside, with tall panels of diamond panes to view the city through. There was a long, padded bench in there, wide enough to lie on. Kili kicked off his boots and stiff jacket, found a thick wool blanket and wrapped himself up. He was asleep in moments.

He awoke to the brush of Fili’s beard on his cheek and turned his head. Fili was leaning over him, draping an extra blanket across his shoulders. The lights of the city were low, and all the lamps inside extinguished. His face was colourless in the shadows. Kili’s hand snaked out and took hold of his wrist.

“Did I wake you?” Fili whispered.

“You did,” said Kili. “I thought you were doing your marital duty?”

Fili chuckled, sounding a little embarrassed. “Harma’s asleep.”

“Were you that terrible?”

Fili licked his lips. “It wouldn’t be anything we haven’t already done, actually, so we figured we’d take a break now before Amma comes clamouring for grand-babies.”

“Oh,” said Kili. He felt rather stupid. Of course they hadn’t waited. Harma had no chaperones to answer to, and Fili was not known for his prudishness. He wondered how he could have missed it; he should have smelled her on Fili, should have sensed the change in his brother’s hungers. His fingers trailed down Fili’s wrist. “Will everything be different, now?”

Fili knelt beside the bench and took his face, though Kili was sticky with sleep and still smelling of spilled wine, and kissed him. “Nothing can change my love for you,” he whispered. “No one will ever separate us, Kili. At the end of our days we will still be gripping tight to each other’s hands, we will die together when we’re ready. I know it.”

“I believe you,” Kili answered. 

 

10.

Kili decided he liked Harma after all. She had a very plain way of speaking; in fact, she became quite tongue-tied when she realised someone was talking at her in innuendos and testing jabs. In private she had a temper, and would not let a thing go once she’d got her teeth into it. But in public she seemed never to take personal offense. She would not be popular the way Sund had been, but even Amma had a grudging affection for her, as an oddity and a foreigner. 

And she loved Fili. Kili could see it as clear as if she'd tattooed it across her skin, over and over in black ink. She preferred no company to his, waiting at the gates of Erebor to meet him whenever he returned with the troops and preferring mostly solitude and books when he was away. She caught him in deep conversation at every opportunity, so that even when Fili was around the palace he was hard to engage, always roaming the halls with his wife, both their golden heads bent towards each other so that they were not looking where they were going. Fili was happy in a way Kili had not known Fili could be happy; publicly, unabashedly, vulnerably. And to his surprise, Kili felt a weight lift from his body that he could not have known existed. It had been there since he was a small child. 

_He was no longer solely responsible for Fili's happiness._ He was no longer the solitary well for Fili's strength and sanity. He had an ally. He had a partner in this task he'd never known he bore. 

So Kili made an effort to like Harma, and he could tell that she was putting in the effort in return. Sometimes Fili still came to his new rooms at night, of course. The first morning afterwards Kili blushed in shame as he walked past Harma in the hall – but she simply inclined her head to him with a commiserative smile and said nothing. Soon she sought him out if he was around the palace while Fili was away at his duties for days on end. 

"I feel like you're the only person who isn't plotting how to use me for their own ends," she told him once, and he knew she wasn't joking. 

He took her to watch the scouts training at their barracks, so that she could escape Amma's concerts and parties. Harma knew how to manage a sheep farm, but she had never swung an axe or ridden a pony – the Iron Hills did not expect such things of their women. Kili taught her these skills and more besides. The other scouts teased him and spread rumours about his closeness with his brother's wife. They meant light, but it darkened his mood when he heard the stories repeated around court and whispered behind his back. Harma didn’t seem to care. 

“I’ll be queen in the end, and they won’t, so let them talk,” she shrugged. 

Fili found them at it one day, Kili with his arms around his wife teaching her to draw back a bow without whipping the string across her cheek. 

"I hope you don't mind," Kili said, as they walked back to the soldiers' quarters that night. "I mean, you know I don't want dams like that, I wouldn't…”

"I don't mind. In fact," Fili leaned in until his mouth brushed Kili's ear. "I rather like it."

It was not the last time he whispered that fantasy in Kili’s ear, but Kili changed the subject whenever it came up. He had never felt jealous of Harma while she had her clothes on, but he did not want to see her laid out on Fili’s sheets. The thought made his cheeks burn and his brow furrow. A dark whisper in the back of his mind asked, “What about Ori? Would Fili have let you bring _him_ to join you both in bed?”

No, not in their lifetimes. So it with went with Fili. But still the friendship between the three of them grew stronger as the years passed. 

Forever after, Kili saw those years as a window into another world – a world where he and his brother had been ordinary, where their pedigree and their duty had not mattered, or mattered less. He clung to those times as evidence, like a bloodied journal, that they _could_ have been happy in another world. That it was not their fault, it was not something inside _them_ that ruined everything – it was their choices, and the betrayal, and the doorless cage of Erebor that tightened constantly around them. 

 

11.

For five years Harma remained barren. Amma faulted her for this, for not eating right or not praying enough to Mahal, but Harma stammered that Amma was probably right and she'd try harder. She told Kili plainly that it was well known among physicians that dwarf men did not peak in their fertility until their hundredth year; that Amma had been quite true to say that Fili had married too young. Harma was content to wait and bear out the mutters about her failings.

One night Kili, coming back from a long patrol, went straight to bathe without speaking to anyone and then up to the lamplit rock garden that Thrain had built on top of the palace. It was constructed on the same balustrade where Fili had once sat sharpening his sword, after the king had forced him out of the army, but there was no trace of the old military-style balustrade now. The rock garden was in the style of the small, meditative areas that the cult of Mahal often kept in their monastries, but Kili didn’t pray. He just wanted the peace and quiet.

He knew that Harma went their often, and by chance he saw her disappearing up the stairs in front of him as he reached corridor up into the garden. He imagined coming upon her in the dim light and giving her a fright to make her laugh (once she’d hit him once or twice), so he slowed his steps and crept up towards the garden with a scout’s feet.

The doors to the garden were embossed with mithril words in praise to Mahal, and hung open in Harma’s wake. Kili slipped through them silently, and found the garden’s peace broken by low voices. He paused behind one of the obelisks at the entrance.

“I’ll leave you be,” Harma was saying. “You’ll want your solitude, I’m sure.”

“No, please, come sit with me,” Frerin’s voice replied. “Unless you’re planning to read aloud, you’ll be no bother.”

Kili froze. He could imagine Frerin reclining on one of the granite benches, his arms draped across the back and his boots kicked off in front of him. 

“No, it’s warmer inside anyway,” Harma said. Her feet crunched on the gravel.

“Niece, please,” Frerin said sharply. “Come sit. I feel like we’ve never spoken properly all this time; you’re so hard to pry away from your husband.”

“It’s your own business if you’ve never found time before now,” Harma said, which was blunt even by her standards, but Kili heard her footsteps recede towards the place where Frerin sat. He wanted to leap out and call her away, but to reveal himself now would show that he had been eavesdropping, and Frerin would not let him forget it. 

“That’s no way to speak to me, Harma. I will be king before Fili is, remember.”

“My apologies,” she said, and after a pause. “No – no. I do not like the way you look at me, Frerin, nor how you always speak as if we shared some secret. We do not. Yes, you will king one day; and I will still be married then. Respect that, now and forever.”

“But you don’t respect marriage where the younger brat’s concerned, do you?” There was a soft scuffing; Frerin must have got to his feet. His voice dropped to a low hiss. “You made a foolish choice, dam, marrying into that poisoned branch of Thror’s line. They will never take the crown, no matter how Thorin patronises them. But you can still tether yourself to a king. Fili can’t give you a child, but I can.”

There was a sharp intake of breath, and Frerin began to speak faster. “It’s my task, I’m the one who’s supposed to carry on the line, Thorin is perverted and Fili was born a traitor but I am royal, my blood is pure, it’s my duty—”

“Frerin!” Harma cried, and Kili knew he couldn’t stand by a moment longer. He stepped from behind the obelisk. Harma had turned to leave and Frerin had taken hold of her wrist. His uncle froze as he caught sight of the movement.

“Frerin,” Kili echoed, a growl rising in her throat. “You disgrace yourself.”

Frerin released Harma and she dashed to Kili’s side. Frerin laughed. “Of course you’re stalking her, you creeping, fatherless worm. Go back to big brother and cry about it. Don’t forget that I’m going to kill you.”

He wasn’t drunk this time. But it wasn’t even the first time he’d said it sober. Kili had been hearing it, worded one way or another, for as long as his uncle had spoken to him. But never in front of someone else. Before Kili realised what she was doing, Harma had crouched and seized hold of a handful of stones the size of bird’s eggs. “You foul beast!” she shouted, and hurled one at Frerin. He ducked and it clattered somewhere in the garden. The next one bounced off his chest and he hunched away from her. 

“Harma, don’t,” Kili put his hand between her shoulders and herded her back towards the light. He said over his shoulder so they could both hear. “Let him fester alone. He’ll always be alone.”

12.

A week later, Kili followed his brother into town with a handful of the city watch. There had been a disturbance and higher authorities had been called for. They found a scene guarded by neighbourhood men who let them through. An old dwarf and his wife knelt prostrate, she sobbing silently, he screaming wordlessly and clawing bloody stripes into his neck. Their daughter’s body had been hauled from the aquaduct with ropes, naked and with many wounds.

The corpse lay wrapped in a blanket not far away. Fili asked the grieving couple if he had permission to view it, to understand what had happened. The mother nodded; the father could not speak. Kili followed his brother to the body.

Fili lifted the folds of the blanket away from the dam’s face. She was young – there was a gold ring through one ear, an expensive gift. Somebody had clearly loved her; perhaps her father. Her hair was still soaked and plastered to her skin and face, turned dark with water. But Kili could tell that, had it been dry, it would have been a pale, shining yellow.

“She was a whore.”

Kili turned sharply to find one of the stout dwarves who had guarded the scene standing behind them. His hands balled into fists and he snarled, “What in Mahal’s name did you just say?”

“Begging your parden, majesty,” the dwarf ducked his head. “I only meant to shed some light. She stood in pub doorways for coin – it’s the truth. These things are bound to happen eventually.”

“You think she deserved life any less than your sisters?” Kili snapped, advancing on the dwarf. Fili grabbed his arm to hold him back. “You think they weep any less?” he pointed at where the dwarf-woman was helping her husband to his feet. Fili pulled him away and told the man to be silent if he had nothing to say.

 

13.

That night, in Fili’s chambers, they told Harma what they had seen. She had a mind for straight thinking, and Fili shared everything with her. But tonight any objectivity was gone.

“You think it was him?” she hissed. “Your piss-cup of an uncle? You think he’s – what – taking revenge on _me_? Or doing to that poor girl what he wishes he could do to me?”

“We know he frequents the brothels in that part of town,” Fili said quietly. “Less than one in fifty girls there have yellow hair – it’s not the fashion right now. And it’s not the first time he’s been suspected of such deviance.”

“What?” Kili turned to him. “When? This isn’t like the farmstead he burned.”

“After his first wife died,” Fili was staring into the candle-flame. “Two dams were murdered, one after the other, a few weeks later. It was even longer before they found the bodies. Thorin believed – well, he had no proof except a few things Frerin said. You know how he likes to boast.”

“Then he must be arrested!” Harma pushed her chair back and shot to her feet. “Murderers should be hanged – any dwarf under the Lonely Mountain must abide by its laws, even a future king – especially a future king!” 

Fili shook his head. “Grandfather will never allow it.”

“How can that be the be-all and end-all?” Harma raged. She flung her arm out. “Justice must be done, or why do we have kings at all? Answer me, Fili!”

But Fili was silent. Harma called him a coward and left, slamming the door behind her. Kili took his brother’s hand and felt his fingers squeezed tight.

“Tell me I’m right,” Fili whispered.

“You’re right,” Kili said.

14.

There was a tax on all working dwarves, these days, that went straight to the cult, but nobody knew that because they didn’t call it a cult tax. Thorin said it did more good than harm: the poor and wretched of Erebor relied on the charity of the temples for food and clothes. But when Kili asked, why not take the tax and give it straight to the poor, not through the cult who did what they wanted with the money, Thorin didn’t anwer. And meanwhile the priests read signs from Mahal that proved that Thrain’s rule was the greatest in all of dwarven history, that the god incarnate worked through him directly. They built great edifices to Mahal and to Thrain, calling the king the god’s avatar. The statues loomed over the city like an angry father. And the temples grew larger and more numerous, and the priests’ houses grew larger still and they ate as well as the king.

Harma had tried to convince Fili to leave the army and take up a stronger hand in politics. Fili made moves, but Thorin changed his titles and gave him new and time-consuming orders within the army. No matter how Fili tried to curry favour with court and put pressure on Thorin, nothing he did made its way into legislation. 

 

15.

They began to execute dwarves who denied the word of the prophets of Mahal. 

Harma learned about it first, and Kili second. She had taken to inviting him around the city in secret while Fili was away from the palace. They spent their evenings in pubs in Cheapside, watching music and boorish theatre in the dance halls and befriending traders in the markets. They wore plain, worn clothes bought from the servants and no one recognized them. 

In the beginning Harma said she missed speaking to dwarves who had accents from the Iron Hills, but Kili soon realised that was not why she took him along. In the smoky taverns he learned from drunkards about the disappearances of dwarves who’d spoken out against Thrain’s rule. He saw the painted marks on the doors of families who did not go to the temples every week, or who did not lay enough offerings on their shrines to Mahal. Together he and Harma hurried past the bodies hanging on street corners for blasphemies. 

“Why show me all this?” Kili asked Harma, as they sat in the rock garden on the roof of the palace late one night, discussing all they had learned. “Why me and not Fili?”

“You see better than him,” Harma said. “And I couldn’t go to him with the truth if you were not on my side.”

“That’s not so,” Kili frowned. “Fili cares most for the people of Erebor. That’s why he will be a better king than Thorin.”

Harma didn’t answer for a moment. And then at last, “If you tell him to be better, I think he will be.”

“It has nothing to do with me!” Kili felt his neck flush with a surge of anger. “He’s always had it in him to be the best, to be greater even than Thror! I’m just the one who’s always believed in him.”

Harma was looking out over the city. Her throat hummed and in a low voice she said, “And he would die before he would disappoint you. Do you think it is _just so_ by accident, Kili?”

 

16.

And still there was no baby. Thrain’s hair was white, and his reclusiveness growing more frequent, his rants at dinnertime more eccentric. Once he accused Thorin of sodomy in the middle of a feast, said that he would have such perversion declared a capital crime, and Thorin would be first on the block. Kili felt his food curdle in his stomach. Amma, as if it was her mantra to Mahal, told Thrain not to speak of such disgusting things at dinner. 

Thorin said calmly, “Who would take care of the accounts, father, if I had no head?” and turned straightaway to Kili, pouring him more wine. “Pay him no heed, Kili.”

“I don’t what you mean,” Kili said, amazed at himself for not stuttering.

 

17.

And still there was no baby; and Fili was ninety-five. 

“Come to bed with us,” Fili said one night, standing in the corridor after even the servants had finished their chores and disappeared to their rooms. He took hold of Kili’s hand and kissed it. “I miss you so much, and Harma loves you and thinks you beautiful; she’s said so. Come to bed with us, Kili. Maybe there will be a child – it doesn’t matter if it’s yours or mine. We’re two sides of the same coin.”

There was gentleness in his tone, tinged with a drop of desperation, that Kili had never heard from him before. This was not Fili’s lust speaking. This was some deeper hunger, and not just to provide the heirs that Grandfather needed. It was more than that – Kili realised that his brother yearned to entwine his loved ones even closer together, to bind their lives as tight as the three strands of a braid, to make those bonds unbreakable. Kili could almost see through Fili’s eyes into his mind. He saw the children his brother imagined running to Fili’s arms, golden-haired like Harma and dark-eyed like Kili, an impossible blend of everything Fili loved most in the world. Children who would never be orphaned or named traitors before they even understood the word, who would not have to learn too fast and too young how to speak like a politician and weather insults like mountains and do battle with their own kin at every turn. 

Kili pressed him up against the wall and kissed him, not heeding that anyone could walk around the corner and see them. But when he drew back he shook his head. “I can’t love your wife like you do, Fili. Only you.”

 

18.

And then, suddenly, there was a baby. Fili told his brother first, after Harma had been to Oin. They were afraid that it would be that madness dams sometimes get when they could not conceive – the phantom children. They still couldn’t be sure, so only Kili knew for a while, and he carried the secret inside of him like a little, growing life of its own. Harma called him into her rooms once and made him feel her belly. He had never touched a dam under her clothes before. Harma was soft and swollen beneath her downy hair.

“Do you think it’s real?” she asked him, chewing her cheek.

“I don’t know!” he laughed. “Ask Oin again.”

At last it felt safe, and they announced it at dinner. Amma cried for three days for joy.

Thrain’s reaction was ambiguous; or if was not, Thorin had covered any trace of his rage well. The first new birth into Thror’s line for ninety years – even the king could not pretend that they were anything but long overdue. 

 

19.

That year, there was no money for new armour for the outer guard. The scouts had gone with repatching and repairing their gear for a decade now, but the outer guard had always got the best. Always, as long as anyone could remember. 

“How bad is it?” Kili asked Thorin.

Thorin shook his head. There was grey in his beard, and in his hair like snow runnels in a mountain valley. “It would not be so bad if he would give less to Mahal, but I cannot pry it from him.”

“Maybe he’ll die soon,” Kili said. Thorin drew back his hand and hit him.

“Thorin!” Kili gasped, clutching his face. He felt more embarrassment than pain. “I didn’t even say ‘I wish’!”

“You have no idea how thin the thread of loyalty is, you fool,” Thorin snapped. And then he reached out to touch the red mark on Kili’s face. “I’m sorry, that was harder than I meant to be.”

“You only wounded my pride,” Kili grumbled.

 

20.

There was no money to bolster the apprenticeship-schools that had always been Erebor’s pride. Since Thror’s time, men and dwarves and even elves from all over the world had come to learn at those schools, and much income had come out of them, and taxes had been fed back in so that children from Erebor could attend for free. But elves had not been admitted since the Wet Sickness. And the smith-masters and jewelers and surveyers who taught there were not being given their wages, though the cost of apprenticeships for foreigners was now six times what it was when Kili had been a cadet in the scouts – and the foreigners’ sons were coming in fewer and fewer numbers. 

Foreigners were unwelcome anyway, Thrain said. Only dwarves who followed Mahal were welcome under the mountain. He wanted to throw out the traders and merchants who came to sell their wares at Erebor’s markets, too. He said they were thieves and liars who were taking money from Erebor. For once it was not clear that Thorin could sway his opinion. 

The priests of mahal agreed with the king. They saw the woes of Erebor first hand, as they went door to door caring for the poor – the starving children, the houses with five families living beneath one roof, the parents who no longer had time to teach their sons to read because they must work twice as long each day just to buy food – and they agreed; it was the foreigners that had stolen Erebor’s wealth. Banish the Dalemen and the Lakemen and the Stonefoots and the Broadbeams and the Firebeards. Take back their property and their forges. Thrain agreed, and tried to send orders to the army, and Thorin delayed him again and again. 

Something had to be done. Kili reminded his brother about the disappearances and the executions of blasphemers and anti-monarchists. Fili insisted that he had tried to stop such things in the past and always been thwarted.

Something had to be done. And still there was no money for new armour, and no stipend for new cadets. Kili found he was facing a generation of scouts that had few young dwarves to take their place. Encroaches on their borders had grown no less frequent. And Fili reported that the outer guard’s wages had gone down by a full silver this year, even though food got more expensive by the month.

“Something has to be done,” Fili said, one night. Kili was eating his dinner late in his brother’s chambers. He had been on two patrols one after the another with nothing but journeybread and water for two weeks. Harma sat at the table, trying to knit a blanket for the baby that now pushed her dress far out from her waist. Amma said that it was good for a mother to keep busy without straining her mind.

Kili wiped his mouth of the back of his hand. “About what?”

“About everything,” Fili growled.

Harma nodded. Kili looked between them. He put down his fork. “What do you mean to do?”

Fili held his gaze. “I mean to finish what Mama started.”

 

21.

They chose a festival day. All of court would be in the palace, as would many of the top priests of Mahal. There would be crowds everywhere, and the city watch always asked for extra support from the outer guard to keep the peace when the festival was in full swing. No one would think twice about the army wandering around inside the halls of Erebor. 

There were seven generals; three, Fili believed would rally behind him. The others would have to be arrested or killed on that first night. One might join them when he saw the alternative, and would commit once it was clear they were winning. 

There were others they had selected to represent them during the brunt of the takeover. Kili knew that his captains within the scouts would die for him. A small sect with the cult of Mahal who had split from the main body would probably help them at the expense of their brothers. And they had already confided in their old tutor, Balin. He knew far more than they realised about his brother’s failed coup under their mother – what had gone wrong, particularly. He helped them plan everything. 

Balin told them more than they had ever known about their mother, how even as a young dam she had tied herself to the army and its leaders, bidding them farewell before battles until she became a symbol of good fortune to them. She had been their princess waiting to welcome them home and when there had been fights she visited the wounded every day. But it was not all charity; she had listened to them when they spoke of war. She had always been clever, as clever has Thorin and far more than Frerin. Once she was married and it was no longer proper to spend time among the soldiers, she had learned tactics and diplomacy from her husband. And when he fell in the war she went to the chief guard, Dwalin, for her education. She had never been satisified. She had always wanted more. 

One night, alone with the old dwarf, Kili asked him, “What did she give your brother in return? How close was their friendship?”

Balin raised his bushy eyebrows, “What exactly are you asking me, Laddie?”

“You know what I’m asking,” Kili said, and after a pause, “I looked up my father’s military record. He marched to war not quite nine months before I was born and died there. Was Dwalin dear to my mother even back then?”

Balin held his gaze and sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I can’t know every secret my brother had, son, but his love for your mother was not one of them. We all knew how he adored her. If he had wanted her between the sheets he would have been more discrete, I think. I once told him to be careful, and he was so livid he almost laid me out with his fists. She was a widow and a princess, and he saw the mere suggestion as a dishonour to her. Even if she had loved him just the same I don’t think he would have accepted an offer – and of her affections I can tell you nothing.”

Kili nodded. It was the answer he had wanted, but he felt an odd disappointment. If Balin had told him something different, it might have satisfied Frerin’s _‘bastard’_. But Frerin was a liar anyway. 

 

22.

“We must bring Thorin in,” Kili said. It was only a few days before the festival. There was a late-season drought outside the mountain, and even beneath the stone the air was uncomfortably warm. The homes and palaces of Erebor were filled with clever mechanisms for heating their rooms, not for dispersing the heat. It stole their sleep and pressed in on them wherever they went.

“No,” Fili shook his head, knotting and unknotting his hands. “Thorin can’t be trusted. He has too much to lose.”

“He will side with us!” Kili insisted, taking hold of Fili’s shaking hands. “You know he fights grandfather constantly. And if we don’t bring him in, we’ll have to kill him. Your claim to the throne will mean nothing while he lives, even in prison or exile.”

Fili let out a long breath. They argued about it back and forth. Harma did not want Thorin told; finally, Fili sided with Kili.

“But not until the very night,” he said. He lifted his eyes. “You should remain at the palace.”

“No – I will be by your side,” Kili said at once.

“You are the only one Thorin will listen to,” Fili held his arms. “You will tell him what he needs to know, at the right time. We will wait for your signal before it begins, so we know where Thorin stands.”

The plan took shape. Harma would stay at court during the festivities. Fili would be off with the army on pretence of hunting orcs that had been spotted beyond the mountain. He would leave trusted guards outside the doors of the palace, supposedly to guard them. If Thorin’s answer was yes, Kili would have the kitchens send a bottle of the Iron Hills liquor to the guards under the guise of helping them enjoy the festival with everyone else. If it was no, it would be a bottle of elvish wine. If anything else went wrong, a barrel of mead would be the warning. Harma would be on his arm whenever possible, and once the signal was given she would go to the court dwarves and ask them to pledge their loyalty to her as their future queen; all who did would be asked to follow her to where a squadron of the outer guards would be waiting. The palace would be under assault from there onwards. Kili would wait to be sure Harma was safe and then slip away as early as possible to join Fili.

“We may die,” Fili said, in the candlelight of the bedroom where the three of them had begun to spend every night, “But we die together.”

“I’m ready,” Harma said, her hand on her belly. “I would not live without you.”

Kili gripped Fili’s neck and pulled him in close, pressing their foreheads together. “I will die for either of you,” he whispered. “You are my future, or else I have none; whatever happens, let me die for you if that is where our paths lead. Do not stop or concede the slightest demand for my sake – not even if I’m captured, even if the king hangs me alive from the palace balcony. You do not yield. You do not hesitate.”

“We won’t,” Fili murmured. Tears were on his cheeks.

 


	4. Delivery

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that if you have triggers to mind, the tags have changed this chapter.

14.

“Thorin.”

Kili called his name twice before Thorin looked up. The music swelled around them, and the halls were full of light as if the sun itself had been let into the palace. The dams were in fine dresses; the dwarves sparkled with gold and precious stones. 

Kili had chosen greys and silvers, his hair done up in a thick braid, with a knife in his boot and nothing more. Once he joined Fili, he would don the outer guard’s armour and take up all the weapons he could carry. Harma wore a shawl and skirts of darkest blue, Thror’s colour, with Erebor’s crest embroidered into her dress and the silks parting over her huge belly like the pages of a book. She had slipped away now, glancing back at Kili every other moment so that she would not miss any development. No one could see the sword at her hip, hidden into the carefully-stitched folds of her skirt. She and Kili had sown it inside the night before, and he had made her practice drawing it out until she was as quick and graceful as it was possible to be when wielding a sword while heavily pregnant. 

Thorin, meanwhile, was in a suit of dark green with thin gold thread, unobstrusive among the flashy court costumes, almost anonymous. It had taken Kili some time to find him, but Thorin had turned towards him before Kili had even touched his arm.

“I need to speak to you,” Kili said to Thorin. “Somewhere quiet.”

In a curtained alcove normally kept for servants to prepare food, Kili turned to his uncle.

“Do you think Erebor will survive long enough for Fili’s son to become king?” he asked.

Thorin tipped his head. His thoughts seemed elsewhere. “By Mahal’s will, I’m sure.”

“I don’t,” Kili didn’t know what to do with his hands. He let them hang at his side, his fists half-closed. “I think he will inherit a desolate ruin, if the king carries on this way.”

Thorin looked at him. “You shouldn’t say such things, Kili. It is treason to question the king.”

“Not if I’m speaking for the king,” Kili said. “If you or Fili were king, I think you’d say the same – and wouldn’t that be better? Couldn’t we save Erebor that way?”

“Kili, you have been drinking,” Thorin gave a low laugh, and reached out to put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder.

“No,” Kili shook his head.

“Then where is this coming from?” Thorin was still smiling, and then the smile faded. “Is there something you need to tell me?”

“I’m not armed,” Kili said, holding his hands at his sides, palms out. The knife didn’t count; he would never be able to take it up in time to kill his uncle, not in these close quarters. “You should know that – I don’t want you to be choosing between us and death here in this room.”

Thorin looked at him, looked into him, taking a step back. “What have you done?”

“We will end Thrain’s rule tonight. Are you with us?” Kili hissed, moving in closer, holding Thorin’s gaze. “Answer me – stand with us! Fili will be far stronger with you advising him, helping him. The mountain will never fall with both of you beneath its roof. That’s how we want it to be, Thorin.”

Thorin’s throat moved, but his lips remained closed. He turned his head away, closing his eyes, and finally looked at Kili again. “Yes. I will stand with you.”

It was as if Kili had been marching through snow and had now come into a warm room with a roaring fire. Everything would be alright, now – they could not lose with Thorin behind them. He nodded, unable to speak his gratitude for a moment. Then he clapped Thorin on the shoulder. “Follow me, when the time comes.”

“What are you going to do?” Thorin asked, grabbing his arm before he could leave the alcove.

“Send word to Fili to begin,” Kili said. “Stay close to me. It’s all ready.”

Thorin nodded, his face bloodless, and followed him out of the alcove. 

It took Kili an agonizingly long time to find a servant who was free to send the liquor bottle down to Fili’s waiting guards. He told Thorin to hold back and carry on with the party as if nothing was wrong and finally, finally, the signal was on its way. He was in one of the lower halls by then, and revelers passed by him and sailed upwards but didn’t linger. Harma found him mere moments later, her teeth clenched as she waited for him to speak.

“It’s done,” Kili whispered, embracing her quickly. “Thorin is with us. Go now – go and address the court, while Grandfather is still smoking in the backroom with his priests.”

“I’ll see you soon,” she nodded. He watched her hurry away, her golden braids hanging down the rippling blue dress as she disappeared through the doorway.

(And he had not given Fili a proper goodbye, either, just an embrace as they parted that morning, and no kiss).

 

13\. 

The wheels of the machine were turning. Harma would be stepping up in front of her court, above the priests and nobles and warriors who had never had much fondness for the Iron Hills princess, but who tonight would have to make a choice – to follow her as their queen or remain inside the palace. Soon the back doors of the palace would be locked, and the great gate thrown open. In mansions and towers across the city, Kili’s scouts and a few of Fili’s most trusted captains were waiting in the shadows for the signals to arrest those generals and high priests not already inside. And when Fili’s troops poured into the courtyard and stormed the keep, Kili would be at his right hand. If they could not catch the guard completely unawares there would be a battle. There would be blood. Even if it all went perfectly, there would be many trials ahead before Thrain’s loyalists were finally subdued. 

Kili knew at last that every detail in his life been threads in a rope, and the rope was holding up this – this event, this landslide, this revolution. He had always been preparing for this. He had always been waiting in a dawn light on the field of this battle. He and Fili, waiting alone for their army to join them, to come marching out of the fog behind them. 

Mama had died so that they could succeed. Ori had taken him in and then vanished to teach him caution. Frerin had been a whetstone, Thrain a hammer and anvil, Thorin a mould – and Kili himself was the fire that pulled Fili’s metal from the ore and made him malleable and forced him into shape.

But for now all he had to make sure the king didn’t walk in during the middle of Harma’s speech.

He turned and headed for a stairway he knew would take him close to the king’s chambers. As he reached it, however, an old dwarf came hurrying down it – one of the valets. He had a request from Amma about Kili’s scouts, and whether they could do drills in the city next week to encourage recruitment. The valet insisted on details about what equipment and assistance the scouts would need. 

Kili growled. “This is not important right now. I have to go.”

“But I need an answer!” the valet followed him desperately. “I’ll be punished if I go to her without one. Please, my prince!”

“Yes – the answer is yes, anything she wants – get out of my way—”

He had no sooner reached the landing when one of his grandmother’s maids appeared at the other end of the hall. “Your majesty! Hurry, please, come with me!” her voice was half hysterical.

“What is it?”

“Your grandmother – she’s locked herself in her rooms – she’s having some sort of fit, she’s gone mad, she says she’ll only come out if you’re there!”

Kili heart skipped a beat. Amma could do terrible things when she had worked herself into a passion. He paused, but – the king probably wouldn’t leave his smoking room early – he couldn’t forgive himself if he left Amma alone, when she might throw herself from her window or worse. “Lead the way,” he barked at the maid, and she picked up her skirts and ran with his boots thudding behind.

Amma’s rooms were near the top of the palace. They reached the doors and Kili thumped his fist against the panels. “Amma! Amma, what’s wrong?”

There was no answer. He tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He burst inside to find the front room empty. His heart raced, imagining his great-grandmother’s body lying upon her bathroom floor with a knife in her dying hands. He dashed through the rooms, calling for her. 

The was no one inside the apartment. At last he rounded on the maid. “Where was she when you left her? Did you not leave someone to guard the door?”

“I – I – I thought someone was here,” the maid’s face was going gray. She wrung her hands. “That’s what I was told.”

“Told?” Kili stormed in close. “Who told you? Did not see with your own eyes?”

“No, my prince,” the maid burst into tears. “The Lord Thorin told me everything. He said Amma’s life depended on my finding you quickly.”

The world surged as if an earthquake had shifted the ground beneath Kili’s feet, and he was left standing upon the very peak of the Lonely Mountain. All the earth was laid out around him, dizzying him. 

“No,” he shook his head and pushed past the maid. “No.”

He ran. He heard boots around the next corner, and as he turned it he collided straight into half a dozen royal guards.

Suddenly there were hands around his arms, holding him in place, and he struggled and bellowed. “Let me go – I order you to let me go!”

“They’re not taking your orders, little nephew.”

Frerin stood behind the guards, still in his fine party clothes. There was a pink flush in his cheeks, and a smile on his face.

“Frerin,” Kili’s breath heaved in his chest and he tried to focus. He must not give it all away now. “What are you doing, Frerin? I’ve just been told that Amma is having a fit, she’s gone missing. We need to find her.”

“Amma is drinking wine in the hall with everyone else,” Frerin drawled. “I think you know that.”

“Something strange is going on, Frerin,” Kili insisted, not struggling against the guards, forcing himself to relax as if he only wanted to help his uncle. “Thorin’s acting queer – I think he’s going to do something terrible.”

“Oh, stop it, you brat, you’ve never had much of a tongue on you,” Frerin tipped his head back with a sigh, closing his eyes as if in prayer to Mahal. At last he lowered his gaze and nodded at the head guard. “Lock him up. Keep watch. I have to go, Kili,” he said sweetly. “The traitors of Dis’ line will be ended tonight. Every single one.” 

Kili twisted, wrenching one arm out of the guards’ grip. “Frerin!” he screamed. “Frerin, don’t! Please, don’t!” someone landed a heavy punch to his abdomen and he doubled up. Gasping, his breath unlocked as he was hauled away. “Stop him – you are charged to protect the royal family – you must stop him, he’s going to kill her—”

They paid him no more heed than if he had been silent. 

 

12.

After they tortured him, he was strung up in one of the cellars by his wrists. They left him for two days in the darkness. A broken rib stretched and ached anew with every breath. Filth accumulated. He wished he could just sleep, to escape the swelling pain in his shoulders, his own stink, but the discomfort kept him awake. Once he heard battle above him and raised his head and thought, _perhaps…_ but nothing came of it.

Someone brought him water. It was the same maid who distracted him with the story about Amma. She was still crying, though presumeably not continuously since he’d last saw her. He wanted to ask her what had happened, but his voice was gone, his throat dry as a smoke-stack. He considered refusing the water, but the sound of the fight made him hope that there was still a chance of rescue – and he was out of his mind with thirst, not thinking properly about the consequences of survival. 

Two more days. More water once a day. Nothing else. The door had a small window that opened once, and the faint light of a candle blinded him. He recognised the dwarf, though he didn’t know his name. One of the city watch – but one who Fili had thought would help them when the time came.

“Wait,” he croaked, as the dwarf made to close the window. “Wait – please –”

The dwarf paused. His eyes were kind. “I can’t speak to you,” he whispered. “The guards are just along the hall, having their dinner.”

“Just tell me if my brother is alive,” Kili said. “Just nod.”

After a long silence, the dwarf nodded. Kili sucked in air and his rib ached but alive, Fili was alive, and perhaps…

The watchman glanced around and then pressed his face to the opening. “He was taken alive this morning. It is over. The rest of the rebels are surrendering.”

Kili nodded, closing his eyes, which stung terribly, but he was too thirsty to cry. He wondered how long ago ‘this morning’ was. He no longer had any clue about the passing of time.

“I can’t carry a message to him,” the dwarf said. “He’s watched constantly by the king’s personal guard. But he asked about you, signed to me to braid my hair up if you were alive and down if you were dead. So he’ll know I’ve found you.”

“Wait,” Kili said again, as the watchman was about to leave. “And Harma?”

The dwarf’s expression contracted and then went blank. He shook his head, “No one told you?”

“I know nothing,” Kili rasped.

“I wasn’t there, but everyone is talking about it,” the watchman said softly. “They said she was speaking to court and Lord Frerin came upon her and assailed her with no warning. She fought and wounded him, but he was stronger. He wouldn’t let anyone near her as she lay dying. He didn’t seem to care that he was hurt. He took up a glass of wine and stood over her as she bled out and drank and boasted that he had won, that he had proved his blood the stronger.”

Kili could not breathe. Finally he managed to say, “Tell me he died of his wounds.”

“Not of those wounds,” the watchman shook his head. “The king’s mother went to him as if to embrace him, and when he took her in his arms she stabbed him – some people say with a dinner knife, some people say she had a sword, I don’t know – and then his guards cut her down. It – it was all such chaos, they say. They were mad, all of them–”

“No,” Kili murmured. “None of them were mad.”

Madness was a thing that made no sense. 

Frerin had never been mad. He had wanted things, and been taught again and again that he could have them if only he was willing to be cruel to get them, to kill for them, and then in the end he had just wanted to kill and be cruel for the pleasure of it. And Amma – old Amma, who lived for her family, who wanted only to see her children’s children outlive her. Frerin should have known not to take the baby from Amma’s arms, not again. 

And Harma, who could have said no to Fili and might never have been pulled into their family like a thin tributary claimed by a flooded river. 

The void opened slowly inside Kili as he thought of them all gone, obliterating each other as they crashed together. The edges of him crumbled away as the void grew. He couldn’t have spoken even if he’d wanted to, not even to pray for them. 

The watchman had to leave him. Kili did not see him again. 

 

11.

Three guards and two serving women came and cut him down on the fifth day. He could not stand, nor lift arms. He was blinded by their lamps. They stripped what was left of his clothes, washed his body in freezing water and scrubbed him until he cried out. Every touch of their hands hurt him, and he recoiled from their rough bruses and their yellow lights. They cleaned the floor of the cell, dressed him in fresh linen and laid down a pallet for him. 

Once they had left he crawled to the pallet. Lying in the darkness, his mind began to return to him. He was alive, and Fili was alive. They had failed, and Harma had died for that failure, but it was not the end. If they could get out they could go to Dain – _yes,_ Kili thought, _that is what we’ll do. We’ll go to the Iron Hills and Dain will raise an army for us and we’ll return to claim our kingdom. Erebor’s captains will be tattered and confused, and many of them will join us when they see Fili marching at the head of the army._

He could see it in his mind, his brother’s golden hair moving beneath the sunlight, his armour polished and sturdy, his swords drawn. They would not fail again.

 

10.

Less than an hour after he had been washed and dressed, he heard footsteps outside the cellar. The door was unlocked and Thorin came in, with two guards holding lamps behind him.

Kili raised himself onto his hands with some effort. Squinting, he watched Thorin cross the room and crouch down beside him. As soon as Thorin’s hand reached to help him up, Kili attacked him.

He could not put much force beside his tackle, but he went for Thorin’s neck, trying to cling to him and strangle him or bite him, whatever it took. Thorin caught his wrists before he could sink teeth or fingers in and he howled in pain, at the raw contact with the skin worn to bleeding while he’d been hung. The guards put down their lamps and – with almost leisurely ease – pulled him off Thorin and shoved him down on to the pallet.

“Betrayer!” Kili screamed, held down by the guards as he struggled. “Back-stabbing monster! You lying sack of putrid elf-shit!”

Thorin had stood quickly. After some time, Kili stopped struggling and sank back against the pallet. Thorin nodded at the guards and they got up and stepped back. At once, Kili launched himself at Thorin again, and once again was pushed back down. Now Thorin knelt and took hold of his face as the guards held his limbs, gripping his head until Kili was forced to look him in the eye.

“I can still save your life,” he said. “Will you listen to me?”

His breath came in uneven sods, but at last Kili nodded. Thorin told the guards to release him, and when he was satisfied that Kili was not going to assault him again he dismissed them from the room. They shut and locked the door behind them, leaving one of the lamps.

“I trust no word from you,” Kili croaked, and spat at Thorin’s feet. He remained sitting on the pallet – he knew he did not have the strength to keep his feet for long, and better to start on the ground than fall there.

Thorin looked down at him, his mouth a grim line. “I have shown only loyalty, Kili. It is you and your brother who betrayed your king and your family, who tried to bring down the monarchy by devious means.”

Kili simply glared. He didn’t care what Thorin told himself to keep the nightmares away. “Why are you here?” he asked.

“Much has happened—” Thorin began, but Kili interrupted him and told him what he knew. Thorin sighed, and Kili wondered what lies he had concocted to get his nephew on his side. How could he call Kili devious? He had only told Thorin the truth, and Thorin had lied and lied and lied to get things his way.

“Hear what I have to offer,” Thorin said. “I have told your grandfather that you warned me about what Fili was about to do, and that all would have been lost if you had not done so brave a thing, that I would not have been able to wake the generals in time and sway much of the army back to our side. I have told him you had no part in the coup, except what your brother forced you to do or tricked you into believing. I think he will spare your life for this. He knows that you are his last chance to carry on Thror’s bloodline.”

Kili stared at him, his mouth gaping. “I would rather die than serve him!”

“I am not giving you a choice,” Thorin cut him off. His voice was low and dangerous. “It is done, Kili. You will be released soon.”

“No!” Kili sat up straighter. “Then I will go to grandfather and tell him the truth!”

“And die for what?” Thorin snapped. “For honour? Do you think your brother wants that? For you to have your life and freedom in your hands, and to throw it away to make a point to a paranoid old king? No one will even know, but for Thrain and I. Do you understand? You will die for no one, and no one will know why you died.”

Kili turned away. “And Fili,” he whispered. “You will save Fili? Exile him?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“It will never work,” Kili looked back at Thorin, feeling tears in his eyes. “I am still my mother’s son. Grandfather will never allow me to be his heir now, Thorin. We are all poisoned, just as Frerin said.”

“I have convinced him otherwise,” Thorin said at once. “I have told him you are not just Dis’ son – you are mine. A true child of Durin’s direct line, with strong blood, Longbeard blood.”

Kili stared at him. “How can he believe that? Who does he think my mother is?”

“He knows that Dis is your mother.”

It took Kili a moment to understand. And then bile rose in his throat. His breath stuck in his chest. He forgot that he needed it, and his hand reached for the wall, clutching with limp fingers. His throat unlocked at last. Another lie – it had to be yet another lie. 

He shook his head. “But it isn’t true, is it, Thorin?”

“I must go. There is still a great deal that needs to be cleaned up,” Thorin picked up the lamp, turned and went to the door, rapping on it sharply. 

“Thorin,” Kili gripped the stones, trying to pull his aching body upright. He wanted to be sick, but had nothing left inside him. “Thorin, please tell me it isn’t true. I won’t tell Thrain – I won’t – just tell me, please—”

“I will protect you, Kili. No matter what.”

The door was unlocked; Thorin was sweeping through it without glancing back at him. Kili screamed after him. “Tell me! _Thorin, please!_ ”

But he was gone, and Kili was left in the darkness. Everything spun around him. The room was too small. The pain in his ribs grew stronger and sharper. It could not go on like this. There was no god who would allow this shame, for this to be the last thing he learned before he died. And he must die, he _must_ , he could not let this family live any longer. It had to end with him. 

 

9.

The servants and the guards returned. It must have been a day since Thorin had visited him. They brought food, which he ate with abandon, deciding he needed the strength for whatever would come next. They gave him water and washed him again, combed his hair and braided it like a prince. They helped his shaking limbs into a fresh set of fine clothes, and even painted the worst of the bruises on his face with the creams that dams used to cover their wrinkles. The tinctures smelled of Amma. Perhaps they _were_ Amma’s, since she had no use for them now.

“What’s happening?” Kili kept asking. They helped him stand and led him out, supporting him until his legs got the hang of it. He changed his question to, “Where are we going?”

But they would not answer.

He was taken through the palace. There were places where windows were broken, curtains burned and doused, furniture missing that he knew should have been there. Dwarves stared at him as he past. Some whispered behind their hands. Some spoke aloud, heedless of secrecy. He heard scraps of the words – 

“…turned on his brother…” 

“…saved us all…”

“…hero…”

“…coward…”

“…traitor…”

He began to feel his chest tighten. So they all knew. Of course they did. For as long as Kili had known him, Thorin had been the one who made the final decision about what was true in the kingdom. He began to see how Thorin had trapped him. No one would believe it if he suddenly claimed to have been on Fili’s side all along. They would think he was trying to assuage his own guilt, or that he had simply gone mad like the rest. It was so twisted and unfair that it made the food feel like stones in his stomach. But as long as he was alive, he might still have a chance to put things right – some things.

And then they took him outside.

They took him out into the square beyond the palace wall.

There was a dais above the crowd, for the noble dwarves, and the priests of Mahal, and the royal family. The execution block was raised on a platform of its own, a fresh-cut block like a headstone waiting for a name. The crowd stared as he passed, the whispers following him – the coward prince, the betrayar who saved the king, the weakling, the remainder. There were angry faces baring their teeth at him. But there were others who clapped, and cheered him as he was taken up the dais to stand beside Thorin.

He could barely keep upright unaided. The broken rib stabbed at him as fresh as when the guard’s boot had cracked it. Thorin put his hand on his shoulder to make sure he didn’t faint.

They brought Fili up.

They brought Fili up to the block.

 

8.

Kili swayed. This had to be a trick. Thorin was testing him. He turned his head. He started to say, “I—” He was going to say, _I’ll do what you want. I’ll do anything. Just stop this._

Thorin put his finger to his lips. “Be silent, or the king will punish you.”

No. No, this was not happening. And it was happening so fast. The crowd roared as Fili was made to kneel before the block. He had been stripped down to his undergarments. His beautiful golden hair had been shaved. They’d left his beard – perhaps afraid the crowd would not recognise him without his beard. His face was blackened and swollen, his wrists bloodied where they were still tied behind his back.

Kili could not feel his legs, nor his hands. Everything had gone far away. He wanted to run, to leap from the dais, to throw himself down on the block beside Fili and beg, _both of us, both of us together._ He could not feel his body.

And it happened so quickly. They did not read out a list of crimes or allow the prisoner to make any final words. No doubt they did not need a martyr crowing for Thrain’s blood with tensions so tight. 

Fili raised his head, looked at the dais. He saw Kili; their eyes met. He smiled through his split lip. He smiled and did not speak, and Kili wanted to close his eyes but no power in the world could have induced him to break Fili’s gaze.

And the axe came down and it was done.

 

7.

The priests of Mahal were mollified; Thrain had rooted yet another curse out of his kingdom, another splinter that had pained the god. The city was elated – it had been a grand event all round, the panic and thrill of the coup, the scandal that three of the royal family had turned on each other, and then the resolution of an execution. Justice had been done. Long live the king! There were rumbles of discontent from the Iron Hills, of course. Dain’s daughter – adopted daughter – had been murdered by a member of Thrain’s family. Thorin had to work all his skills as a mediator and a peacemaker to keep Dain from marching on the mountain. He was busy every moment of the day and night, and yet it still felt like he was watching Kili always. 

Kili had guards inside the room even while he slept. His apartment and clothes were searched every day. What they were looking for, Kili wasn’t sure – did they think that if had his bow, he might take down the monarchy alone? He had no allies left. Balin had been killed in the fighting, as had two of the generals who’d sided with Fili, and many of Kili’s best scouts. He was not allowed out of the palace to see the rest. It occurred to him, distantly, that he might never be allowed out of the palace again. He might never see the sun or smell fresh rain or even the streets of Cheapside for the rest of his life.

Thorin came to him, in the rare moments he had free from running the kingdom. He asked him if needed anything, if he was healing well. Kili answered numbly, “Will Thrain die soon?”

They were sitting on Kili’s bed together. Thorin had never been so attentive, so – (Kili gagged) – so fatherly, before now. He sighed. “That is for Mahal to know, Kili. But many dwarves have lived far longer than he.”

“When he dies, will I be released?” Kili asked, staring at the window. The lights of the city glowed behind it, warped and blurred by the glass. There seemed to be fewer than when he was a child. There were probably fewer people in Erebor these days. “Or will you keep me like this?”

Thorin put his hand over Kili’s, and Kili pulled away. Thorin sat back again. “I will always do what is best for you.”

Another time, Thorin brought dinner to Kili’s rooms and ate with him. Kili could stomach very little. As he watched Thorin eat he hated him, wishing him dead moment by passing moment. It rather ruined his appetite. He asked Thorin, “Did you tell Fili the truth before the king killed him? Did he go to the block believing I betrayed him?”

Thorin raised his eyes. “I never spoke to him. No one was allowed to speak to him after he was captured.”

Kili lay alone that night on the side of his body that was not still healing. The bed was huge and cold. He repeated his secret oath under his breath, swearing to take no lord but Fili, to serve him and him alone even to his death. The words blurred, mixed up together like lovers beneath the sheets. _There is nothing more cursed than an oath-breaker… You are my captain for all time, and I will have no other._ It sounded like the prayer of a stupid child, and did not comfort him. In the darkness, curled into himself, he imagined he could reach out and find his brother there, soft curls of hair on the pillow and that warm, muscled shoulder. He imagined the smell of him. It hurt. It hurt like a spear in his gut, like his head was being forced beneath some deep water until the pressure began to crush his mind inwards.

He would never know. He would never know if Fili had died thinking his brother had betrayed him. He would never be able to fix it.

Never.

_No other captain._

Never.

_Oath-breaker._

Never. 

_Fili is dead._

Never. 

 

6.

Kili lived in a daze, moving and acting and speaking without thinking or caring. He was eventually allowed to sleep without guards, though the door was locked from the outside and the windows nailed shut. 

He dreamed of his mother, though he could not remember her face when he woke. In his dreams she whispered in his ear. The words sounded like the wings of insects. Slowly a voice emerged from the soft clamour. It was the ragged, old voice of a weathered crone.

“You’re mine,” Mama whispered. “No one else’s. Not Vili’s, not Dwalin’s, not even Thorin’s. The world can take my throne, take my family, take my life, but Kili is mine. Mine. Me. Mine. I – you – we – we took our brothers to bed – we killed them all for the sake of power.”

He awoke sweating and strangled in his sheets. 

He was brought before his grandfather eventually. The old man lounged fat and white on his throne, white skin, white hair, white hands. Food dribbled down his chest and his eyes were bloodshot. He muttered to himself as Kili entered, and spat into a golden bowl beside his throne. Thrain made him repeat the story that Thorin had told, of the betrayal, of his wish to remain loyal to his king. He spoke it all in a numb voice, but an ember was finally beginning to flare in his heart. Fili would want him to live. Fili would want him to take back Erebor. One day – one day Thrain would die, and then only Thorin would stand between him and the throne. He could not imagine being king. He could never be as good as king as Fili would have been. But he could try.

Thrain told him that he was to be married. There was a granddaughter of Dain, one of their distant cousins, who would soon come of age. They must appease Dain for the death of Harma and the broken unity between their kingdoms, much as Thrain hated it. Kili would marry her next summer. He would get her fattened and spilling babes as soon as possible, and the line of Thror would not die.

“How old is she?” Kili asked, raising his head at last. 

Thrain was furious that he dared ask a question, any question, but Thorin calmed him down and told Kili, “She will be thirty-four next summer.”

“What?” Kili whispered, looking between Thorin and the king. “She’s not even of age? You want me to be put children in a _child_?”

Thrain roared and mumbled to himself in between his roars. Thorin hurried Kili out into the corridor. “You don’t have to, not at once,” he said as he herded Kili along to the viewing room at the end of the hall. “Of course you don’t. When she asks you to. I know you can do it,” he clapped his hand on Kili’s shoulder.

Kili tried to imagine fucking a dam. He would close his eyes and think of something else. It was the only way. Were they really discussing this, like they were breeding ponies? Was this really what his uncle wanted of him?

“May I live outside the palace, once I’m married?” Kili asked. “Everyone here knows me. They know what I did. May I at least live somewhere quiet with my wife, where they don’t stare at me?”

“I don’t think Thrain will allow that,” Thorin said heavily.

“Put me under house arrest. Post guards outside my door every hour of the day. I can’t live in this palace, Thorin. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t hate it—”

Thorin took both his arms. “Kili, Thrain will not allow you to live alone with your children. He will want them raised by people he can trust – by myself, by governesses he’s chosen, by your wife if he decides he likes her. I don’t think you will be given time alone with them unless you prove yourself to be very well-behaved.”

Kili gaped at him. “He won’t let me be alone with my own children?” he felt as if he’d been struck in the head. “He won’t – or you won’t?” 

And then it became clear, as if the muck had suddenly settled on the bottom of the pond. “I will never be king, will I? You will pass me over when you die and name one of my sons your heir. Won’t you?”

“You sound as paranoid as your grandfather,” Thorin smiled, but Thorin had no sense of humour, so Kili knew the smile was a lie. “Now, I must go back and pacify the king – you can return to your rooms, if you like.”

Kili watched him hurry back to the throne room. He stood on the spot until he was sure his legs would not give out. He realised suddenly that he had no guards – they were all back in the hall with Thorin. He was alone in the corridor. The viewing room was only a few steps onward; he went to it.

The room extended from the palace and was panelled on three walls with glass squares, so that the lights of the city flowed in on all sides. Through two large doors was a balcony. Kili went out onto it and put his hands on the marble railing, looking down at Erebor. His beautiful city. His dying city. 

It would be so easy to step out into the drop. He looked over the railing. The courtyard was four levels below, made of hard cobbles. No one was around. It would be quick and quiet. Mahal would understand, if Mahal existed. 

He stood there, and willed himself forward. After a long time, he went back inside and walked the long route to his chambers alone. But he left the doors of the viewing room open, wishing spitefully for Thorin to see them and understand.

 

5.

He dreamed of his mother. He couldn’t see her face. He could hear the crack of stone collapsing in the distance. He was inside the mountain, but he could not see its roof. 

“There were three wars,” Mama said, speaking to the empty air, her hands on her belly. “Thorin has won the first two.”

This time Kili woke with a twitch, but his heart was not racing. He stared across the darkened room, and fell asleep again soon after. 

He had grown practiced at talking and moving without caring or thinking about it. He sat inside his head and watched himself go about his day as if watching someone else’s life. He was not the one living it. His life had ended with the sweep of an axe. A coin could never have just one side. 

Thorin must have recognised his good behaviour. There was talk of allowing Kili to go hunting again, if Oin agreed that he was fully healed. Not back to the scouts, of course – he would not be allowed to have authority over any dwarf.

The cult still advised Grandfather on everything. They did not want Kili to be married until he had been inducted into their ranks, as both the king and Thorin had been. He was taken to their mass prayers and taught to sing with the congregation. When certain divinations and tests had been done, he was put through a simple ritual in which he had to swear his life to Mahal and Mahal’s teachings, and had to eat a very small spoon of dust, which he choked on and half-coughed back into his fist as the priests glared. It was almost comedic in the seriousness with which it was carried out. Fili would have laughed. 

“You must attend prayers three times a week, two days of your choosing and the holy day,” the palace’s head priest told him as they walked back to Kili’s rooms. “If you ever feel you have disobeyed Mahal or are fearful that you might disobey, you come to me and I will council you. I will not tell anyone what you tell me in confidence.”

Kili made an assenting noise to show he understood. The chance of any important secret not getting back to Thorin seemed as likely as Smaug the Terrible rising from the grave and kneeling before Thrain in apology. 

“In fact, why don’t you have a session immediately?” the priest continued. “I’m very busy this week, but I’ll have someone sent up to listen to your confessions. Come to the chapel tomorrow, right before breakfast.”

Kili agreed, because he agreed to everything people told him these days. The next morning he rose early and went to the chapel. He’d never been inside, but it was not particularly interesting – like all the cult’s places of worship, it was all whitewashed walls and beams of dark brown wood. There were low benches for a small congregation, facing the stone altar, which stood against the wall on the raised sanctuary. The monk who must be his confessor was kneeling before the altar, lighting the incense with some difficulty. There were two cushions a step below the sanctuary. Evidently they were supposed to kneel and face each other.

Kili went to the lower cushion and crouched down, resting his hands on his thighs.

“How does this work?” he asked the monk in a bored drawl. “Do you ask me questions, or say a prayer first, or do I just open up and tell you whatever I want?”

The monk turned, shaking the kindling-stick out between his fingers, and pushed back his hood.

“You can tell me whatever you want, Kili,” Ori said.

 

4.

Kili stood, or tried to stand. He got half a step towards the altar before he fell, and Ori was there to grab him. Ori pulled him in and clutched him tight against the scratchy, white wool of his habit. Kili slumped limp against him, and Ori stayed there kneeling, holding him, his hands clenched in Kili’s clothes.

Kili wept. He had not wept properly since the cellar. He had never been alone enough to weep. Now his body was wracked with sobs, heaving him from chest to fingertips like a great earthquake that broke through him again and again. Ori smelled of incense and holy oil, and of Ori, the warm and unmistakeable smell of Ori’s skin that he had forgotten utterly and yet now seemed as familiar as if it had been yesterday. He did not try to hold back his cries. He couldn’t. They flooded from him one after another. They were heavy, full sounds like a blubbering child. 

Ori said nothing. He held Kili tight long after his arms must have ached and his knees must have grown numb. At last, Kili’s sobs became words, accusatory, then self-accusatory, then broken, and Ori simply muttered meaningless platitudes, “I’m sorry,” and “It’s alright,” and “I know,” over and over.

He died there in Ori’s arms, and came back to life, and was not healed – but was alive, alive as he had not been before. He felt his body again, felt like he was truly inside it, looking out through his own eyes, looking at Ori with his shaved head and chin and new wrinkles in the corners of his eyes and a smile that Kili knew better than he knew his own face. 

“Tell me what happened,” Ori said. 

Kili told him in fits and starts, beginning at the end and going backwards and forwards as if flicking through the pages of a book. He left nothing out, not even what Thorin had told him about his parentage. While he talked they moved to sit on the stairs close to the altar, Ori on the upper step, both of them leaning their sides against the wall. Kili’s eyes stung and the salt dried on his cheeks. His voice was clear but low, and sometimes he stuttered. 

“Nothing much happens in the monastry that’s worth telling,” Ori said, when Kili asked him what had happened in the twenty years distance between them. “Monks gossip and fight and mess up as often as everyone else. I wanted to write you, sometimes, but then I thought there’s nothing to tell in a letter. So I wanted to visit, but then – I didn’t know if you hated me or if you’d be embarrassed because people guessed why I was there, and truth be told I suppose I angry, too. You hadn’t written to me either and – well, I know what you’re like, you spoiled child, when you don’t get what you want,” he smiled broadly and tugged at Kili’s beard. “And look at this – I never thought I’d see you with such a fine beard.”

“You still look ridiculous without one,” croaked Kili. His voice was hoarse from talking.

“Good,” Ori rested his head against the wall. “Celibacy, remember?”

Kili swallowed, looking him up and down, the shapeless robe, the totems of Mahal hanging on his belt. “You really believe all those rules, then, after all these years?”

“It’s the path I’ve chosen,” Ori answered. “It believes in me.”

“And your fits?” Kili asked. “Has Mahal cured those, as your reward?”

Ori’s eyes dropped. He shook his head, his mouth pulled into a pained smile. He took Kili’s hand again between both of his own. “But they take good care of me up there in the monastry,” he said, his voice breaking a little at the end. “And they didn’t ask questions when I said I wanted to spend some time in the city temples. So here I’ve been, waiting and hoping for a chance to see you,” his thumb rubbed back and forth across the bridge of Kili’s wrist. “I’m sorry it took four deaths to make me return.”

“Five,” said Kili quietly, glancing down at their knotted hands. “If you count Harma’s baby.”

“Well, obviously, but I wasn’t counting Frerin,” Ori answered, and Kili laughed, and the laughter turned back into sobs, and he bent forward and heaved for breath. Ori rubbed his back and pressed his lips to the crown of his head until he could speak again.

“I w-wish you could have m-met Harma,” Kili said, wiping his the heel of his hand. “She had a head for numbers, like you’ve got a head for w-w-words. And I dreamt last week – I dreamt we lived together, the four of us, in a house in the woods, with no one else.”

Ori’s hand gripped warm against the side of his neck. “Would never have worked. Fili would have bossed me around something terrible.” 

Kili gave a choked laugh again, resting his head on one hand, feeling himself break and made anew a thousand times within each moment, finally understanding that he could only go on and never back. 

 

3.

“The way I see it,” said Ori. “You have three choices. You can kill yourself – and the prophets say that’s against the will of Mahal, but Mahal knows, you’re not just any dwarf, Kili. Your suicide would mean something; deny the king his heir; leave the throne to Dain’s line when Thorin dies. I think you’d be forgiven. Or you can do as they wish, marry this poor little dam, do the best you can by her and fulfill your duty – and who knows? Maybe you’ll claw back the power they’ve tried to take from you. Maybe you’ll teach your sons the right lessons, and they’ll be good kings, and you’ll be remembered as the heir who was never king but who still brought Erebor back to greatness.”

Kili frowned. “And what’s the third option?” 

Ori shrugged. “It’s not a sensible idea.”

“My family has never been sensible,” Kili answered.

Ori told him what he was thinking. 

Four months later, spring filled up the rivers and the creeks. It thickened the air outside the moutain with birdsong and the smell of green, growing things, and Thorin let Kili to go hunting. After three trips trying to stalk game with a crowd of noisy, clanking guards, he finally relented and allowed him to go hunting _alone_.

Kili rode through the forests that clothed the mountain. There was no rain today, but there had been last night. The breeze knocked it from the leaves as he passed beneath, spattering his skin, and he turned his face up to meet it. 

There was a waterfall on the west arm of the mountain which at this time of year was bursting its banks and churning huge volumes of water into the air and down onto the rocks below. The mist rose high up above the pine tops, sparkling like a seam of silver in a mine. There was a bridge over the cusp of the falls, built by the Dale men in years long past. A shrine to one of their gods was carved into the centre above the keystone; some lesser maia whose motifs Kili didn’t recognise. Ori reported that it was a popular place for scorned lovers and ruined businessmen to kill themselves, about once or twice a generation. Kili stopped his pony by the shrine and tied her bridle to the mossy railing. He took off all his hunting gear and laid it down beside her, and then his outer coat as well, folding it neatly. This done, he removed his boots and carried them under his arm, stepping carefully on stones and bare logs so as to leave no footprints off the bridge.

 

2.

There were many thin sheep-paths through the forest. Kili took one that followed the tributary up the hill until he came upon an old farmhouse, its roof collapsed in and walls beginning to crumble. Ori had described it to him, and was waiting for him beside the blackened fireplace. He had a bag with an old set of monk’s robes – so threadbare and fouled with mould that they could not have been described as white any more. They had been left at the back of the communal wardrobes and should have been thrown out years ago. Kili took off his clothes and Ori showed him how to tie the cloth belt properly. His fine boots would have to stay – missing shoes would have been noticed. But travelling monks wore whatever they needed to against the elements, so they would not attract attention.

Ori shaved his head with quick, neat strokes of his knife, only once drawing blood. The beard took a little longer, and Ori complained that he was sorry to see it go. “You look so handsome,” he sighed.

“Give me a kiss,” Kili grinned, now bare-chinned, jutting his lower jaw out. His whole head felt cold and lightened by its loss. “Go on. Mahal’s not watching.”

Ori pecked him on the cheek, and laughed at his expression of disappointment. They burned everything – hair, clothes, even his knife whose bone handle might have been recognised – buried the ashes and covered the turned earth with moss to hide it. 

Ori had brought him a bedroll and some supplies; food and water, needle and thread, thin rope and some clean cloths for bandages or other purposes, all wrapped in oilskin and tied with straps.

“Won’t they notice these are missing?” Kili asked.

“I bought them from a trader in Dale a few days ago,” Ori shrugged. “I get a little money from teaching the children of some of the dwarves in Dale. And there’s this, too,” he pressed a book into Kili’s hands, similarly bound in leather all round to keep the water out. “Prayers and hymns. Learn it – you must be able to act the part of a monk. You’ll be able to, won’t you? Like I taught you – stay humble, never raise your voice in anger, offer your blessings and prayers first and if people have nothing to give, move on – or take whatever they can give, even if it’s just a pile of hay in the barn for the night. Tell them stories to make them listen to you; everyone wants to hear news from far away. Follow the horse traders back to Rohan and from there you can go anywhere. Will you remember all that?”

“I’ll remember, I promise!” Kili rolled his eyes.

“I don’t think you will,” Ori chewed his thumbnail. “I don’t think you can be humble and take alms to save your life.”

Kili sighed as he swung the supplies onto his back. He looked at Ori. “Come with me,” he said. “Just leave it all, Ori – come with me. Everything will be different.”

But Ori shook his head. “And I’ll have my fits at the worst times, I’ll fall from a mountain path and die, and you’ll never forgive yourself. Besides, if I’m missing they’ll know what you’ve done. They’ll torture the other monks to find us, they might even go after my brother. No – one dwarf alone can disappear better than two.”

Kili nodded. He pulled Ori into a tight embrace, and they stayed that way for some time, and finally parted. 

 

1.

And away he went along a path that would take him around Dale and down the River Running to Laketown. He remembered maps studied over and over in his childhood, of roads that knew more lands along their length than Kili had seen in his life. He remembered distant lessons in khuzdul, in which prayers were spoken, and scraps of the elvish languages that he had learned in the course of his duties. He remembered lessons in how to rule and command and negotiate. He began to teach himself to forget them. And as he walked pieces of him fell away like a winter pelt. 

Not once did he look back at the Lonely Mountain. He was not lonely. He could only hear one set of footsteps, but behind him his mind could see another dwarf walking through the long grass, whose golden hair was hanging free and shining in the sun.


End file.
